I personally believe couch co-op is so much better than online, so I hope it does. My biggest gripe with online co-op is that there will be times when your Internet can drop, or your game/voice chat program might decide to crash on you, or something equally as annoying like your friend (or you) lagging up a storm and making it hard to play.
At least with couch co-op I can be more sure that I ain’t gonna have any of those problems causing as much issues (besides the game crashing). And I also get the enjoyment of being in the same room with a friend.
Such a scum bag move by Sony that I have to buy another DS5 to play this with my daughter on PS5 when I have several perfectly good DS4s whose only purpose at this point is to occupy a landfill it seems.
Obligatory mention of Tape to Tape, my favourite game of 2023 with excellent couch coop.
Forget split-screen, a lot of people have two monitors these days. Steam hardware survey has “Multi-Monitor Desktop Resolution” as “other” for 50% of their users, which I’m guessing means about 50% of people have multiple screens. Think about it, game devs.
The issue isn’t screen real estate, but processing power
When you do split screen, you’re basically having to render two games at once (a bunch of stuff can be “shared” like physics and such, but you still have to render two PoVs at the very least). This is helped slightly in split screen by the fact that you’re rendering a much smaller PoV for each player, with multi-monitor split screen, you lose that edge.
Basically it could totally be done, but only on pretty decent hardware and/or a really efficient game
It’s almost like the pursuit of realistic graphics hamstrings games by making actual fun, useful features like couch co-op impractical
It’s also that you’re rarely going to want to spend that much development time on a feature that only works on one platform out of 2-4.
But the PlayStation 5 version, released last week, introduces a third option: local, or so-called couch co-op, which allows people to play the old-fashioned way on a split screen, sitting side-by-side.
I’m pretty sure this feature also exists on the PC version.
But yes, split-screen is an endangered species at this point. Halo Infinite dropped the feature and Forza is about to launch without it. Helldivers used to have shared-screen co-op, and now it’s online-only. The Quake 2 remaster supports 8 player split-screen, which makes so much sense in the age of large HD TVs that I can’t believe no one bothers with it, but FPS games in general are also almost extinct, so maybe that comes with that territory. Hardly any game is going to have as demanding of a use case as Baldur’s Gate 3, so I’d really like to see more games sacrifice some graphical fidelity in order to support the feature, if possible. Just about any multiplayer game these days is designed to be a live service that you log into every day rather than a game that you can play through for a handful of hours with friends and have a satisfying experience. It’s money left on the table when there’s only so many of the former that the market can possibly sustain.
FPS games in general are almost extinct
Uh, huh? You living under a rock? FPS games are very much alive, unless you meant to specify.
I mean the kinds that aren’t extraction shooters or battle royales or some other kind of “live service” that pretends it’s a service so it doesn’t have to admit that it’s a bad product. Something more substantial than the crop of “boomer shooters”, with co-op and/or friendly deathmatch; something with objective design and a story that’s interesting to follow. Basically what we used to get between the late 90s up through the middle of the last decade; what Halo used to be before they decided it had to be both open world and a live service.
