I sure hope there continues to be more couch co-op games. My son and I are always looking for more games to play together.
Highly recommend “it takes two”. Love being told I’m bad at relationships by a talking book…while playing with my fiance.
It’s a great couch co-op experience. BG3 and the divinity games are fantastic for couples.
My girlfriend and I could not get into the Divinity games despite being rpg nerds. It’s a shame too in an era with so little good couch co-op games.
There are a ton of couch co-op games! Just not AAA
- Ultimate chicken horse
- It takes Two
- Overcooked 1 & 2
- jackbox games for parties
- Super Bunny man
- cuphead
- human fall flat
- lovers in a dangerous spacetime
- magika
- all Lego games
- moving out 2
Why not try BG3 then? Very different in feel compared to the Larian Divinity games. I couldn’t get into those either, but BG3 has me hooked with 150 hours and counting.
I’ve been thinking about it but that’s a lot of money to just be disappointed again. I already dropped $40 this year on Eldenring and didn’t like it.
For people who played BG3 in couch co-op already, what was the experience like exactly? Was it annoying to be linked to the same camera / environment compared to usual online coop where every player has their own controls I imagine? Is there a lot of downtime while someone is managing their character/inventory? Also, would you recommend it for the first playthrough?
I’m waiting for the dust to settle (and to have some more free time) but I am curious about trying it down the line, possibly over steam remote play.
Also interested to hear! Wife and I have our own games going separately right now for our first play though but we’ve talked about co-oping. Interested to hear the couch experience!
Wife and I are really liking it. We don’t have a lot of time to play these days though since we have a 5 month old. Besides the audio issues it’s been a great experience so far! Seems like this game has enough to keep us entertained for a long time.
I’m literally in the same boat with a 4 month old. I should get her to try this with me.
It’s splitscreen, so there’s no down time. Both players can do everything simultaneously, they are not bound to the same environment. I surely recommend it. It will most likely be the only way I play it.
In Original Sin games there was a hybrid of split and shared screen, so you could change it on the fly. I hope they add it in this game too.
Honestly… it’s not great. I would not recommend it unless you’re playing with somebody who is not put off by constant bugs and general jank.
In terms of bugs, I’ve had several occasions where one player can no longer open the map - it just starts opening the quest log instead of the map. I’ve also had a few occasions of the screen just going completely white. Also, I’ve had a player just become locked in a dialogue with no way of exiting.
For an example of jankiness, one key aspect of the whole game, dialogues, is just completely awful:
- Both players can begin separate dialogues at the same time, one just gets muted
- It’s impossible to automatically begin a dialogue with two players, one player has to start it, and the other has to “listen” to it as an additional step
- It’s impossible to switch control of dialogues during a dialogue. This is constantly an issue, because sometimes, dialogues are triggered when you walk past some invisible checkpoint. Basically you’re forced to always have your high charisma player to walk in front and hope they end up triggering all the dialogues.
- It’s impossible to contribute to dialogues in any way as the “listening” player. Even if you have some aspect to your character that might provide an interesting line, you are just locked out.
- If both players speak to a character in succession, the exact same dialogue gets repeated. It’s jarring and completely breaks immersion.
There’s more, but I’m kind of getting more and more annoyed at the game as I write this, so I think I will just stop here, you probably get the picture 😅
I think the co-op is a complete afterthought in this game, and I will probably be replaying it in single player for a hopefully better experience at some point.
Oh wow. We’ve really enjoyed the single player experience. Just comparing our story’s is really fun to see how it differentiates.
I guess once we give co-op a go, it’ll be with new characters we aren’t tied to and knowing it may not be the best experience. Edited to try it!nonetheless! But thanks for the insight and tips. Hopefully some of the issues get patched up!
My wife and I have almost finished our playthrough in split screen, and I’ve done a act or so solo, so let me share my experience
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The performance can get a bit spotty - I’ve got a really nice rig, and admittedly I’m playing on max setting and 4k resolution, but we do have frame spikes in split screen that you don’t see in solo
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The way inventory is managed is kind of a pain, each player has their own inventory, comprised of their characters stuff, as well as whatever NPCs happen to be associated with that player, so it’s not as straightforward to manage as in Solo. Also if my wife has something in her camp chest, she has to get it herself, I can’t get it for her.
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The way dialogue is handled is a mess (though I’d argue this is partly a problem for solo mode too). If both players are in separate dialogues at the same time, then only half the audio actually gets played, and which half gets played is super inconsistent, to where neither player is really having a smooth experience. Additionally, which player is in control of a dialogues is whoever triggered it, which wouldn’t be so bad except you often wind up triggering them on accident
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Combat feels slightly slower/more boring, because you’re waiting for another person to make their turns, and that only gets worse if they’re playing a build that has lots of minions. I often find myself taking my phone out during combat because it gets boring waiting for them to do their turns.
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Which characters belong to which controllers gets mixed up all the time, and we’re always having to fix it when we first hop on
Those gripes aside it is a lot of fun, you just have to learn to deal with the quirks. But it’s pretty clear while playing that it was designed as a single player game, with couch coop tacked on top of that primary goal
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.
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.
