Now players only have one option most of the time. When I was younger, you could play console games both in person with splitscreen and online once Xbox Live debuted. To me, there is no way to rationalize this as a step forward. And they’re content playing the way they do, so who cares? If they grow up playing games without splitscreen, they’ll never know what they lost. I’ve been told this is a “generational” thing, and I’m suddenly losing the plot about the upcoming Generation Z and their gaming preferences. If better graphics are the price of losing that feature for games like Halo 5, forget it, I don’t want them. There is no argument you can come up with that warrants a lack of splitscreen, especially in an age when these new consoles are supposed to have more features than ever. I wouldn’t care if Halo 5 looked like Halo 3 from a graphics perspective if it would allow me to play games on my couch with my friends again. But as I said in my original piece, even that excuse doesn’t cut it. The “technical” explanation given at least makes sense, that the game will look visually bad if splitscreen is integrated. If splitscreen play is down and online play is up across the industry, the reason for that isn’t some shift in player’s preferences, it’s because of what’s being forced upon them. The fact is that companies have just gotten rid of it in most games for technical reasons, and players have had to adjust accordingly. I can’t remember any video game fan ever requesting that splitscreen be cut from a game. Spencer is acting like the market has moved on because people have abandoned splitscreen because they just love online play so much more. While yes, it is a lot harder to get my buddies to come over to play couch co-op games these days, most of the reason for that is because there are so damn few couch co-op games in existence anymore. When my friends were over, we’d play splitscreen, when they weren’t, we’d play via Live/headset. The implication there is somehow that splitscreen multiplayer and Xbox Live multiplayer can’t exist at the same time, which is exactly how we used to play Halo 3. Spencer’s line about people being “too busy” to all hang out in the same place so splitscreen isn't needed makes literally no sense. Playing 2-4 player Halo 3 was probably our best gaming experience of all time, but now even that signature co-op series will force me to send my friends home (and uh, buy Xbox Ones) if I want to play with them. We had to take turns passing a single controller around the room to play Destiny, and when I told them that Halo 5 wasn’t going to have splitscreen either, they were shocked. I wrote an entire post last week called “ The New Loneliness of Video Games” where I discussed a situation where my old gaming buddies came over for some beers, and were massively disappointed to learn that this new era of gaming didn’t come with games we could actually play together while in the same room. This is where he loses me, and actually kind of makes me mad. It's one of the advantages that Xbox Live obviously offers." "I love the nostalgia of the couch co-op of what Halo did in the past, but I also know in the realities of the day with people's busy lives, it's not as easy to get everybody in the same physical place. For lots more on the pros and cons of the digital-only system, check out the video embedded above."I think the team made a trade-off based on what they see happening in the market today and what they wanted to do with their game," Spencer said. The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition launches on May 7 for $250 USD. Not only that, but Phil Spencer says the majority of Halo co-op happens across Xbox Live, not locally. Halo 5 executive producer Josh Holmes said the decision to remove split-screen from Halo 5 was " one of the most difficult ones we've ever had to make as a studio." He added that Halo 5's new "massive-scale environments," better visuals, and improved AI might have been "compromised" if split-screen was in the mix. A still from the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition appeared to show Halo 5 split-screen Developer 343 has said time and again that it will never add split-screen to Halo 5, but thankfully Halo Infinite will have this feature. Halo 5 launched without split-screen multiplayer, a staple of the franchise, and fans quickly let Microsoft know about this omission. The footage in question looks to be a little bit of good old fashioned creative liberty in the editing bay. Sorry to disappoint but no, splitscreen isn’t being added to Halo 5.
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