Why Are Developers withholding splitscreen/dual screen.

motherboard1 · Mar 19, 2015

Let me start off by saying that playing Borderlands 2 Co-op with a buddy has been some of the best gaming I've had.

I ran the game on 2 x 1080p displays (full screen for each player) with a HD7950 (R9 280 non x equivalent) Maxed out with Anti Aliasing (no Physx for AMD card though) And we played the entire game start to finish, plus some DLC without so much as a hiccup. It was smooth as silk.

Co-op was a staple of console gaming in previous generations. And with modern hardware, especially multiple core processors lending themselves so perfectly to the task of running two codes with zero performance loss on the CPU side. Why are devs going in the opposite direction and removing co-op? Whats they're angle?

Btw, Borderlands 2 had it's Co-op mode removed for PC, and is only possible with a 3rd party mod, or by looking up a few commands and running them with a simple batch script, which allows you any combo of split screen or multi monitor setups up to 4 players. So the real question here is why are developers killing the co-op feature?

freakdiablo · Mar 23, 2015

I've always figured it was a control input issue. Many people use mice and keyboards for FPS PC games and trying to use two sets at once complicates things. I'm guessing the B2 co-op mod is controller based?

petteyg359 · Mar 25, 2015

Why let four people play the same $60 copy of a game when you can get them to buy four copies for $240? EA-style management happened to co-op gaming, that's what.

freakdiablo said:
I've always figured it was a control input issue. Many people use mice and keyboards for FPS PC games and trying to use two sets at once complicates things. I'm guessing the B2 co-op mod is controller based?

No such issue exists. Any application can very easily distinguish between any number of connected keyboards and mice, if they want to, just as they can differentiate multiple connected screens (assuming nothing like Eyefinity is pretending they're just one big screen, of course). The Windows APIs for that aren't complicated in the least compared to implementing a game engine.

Janus67 · Mar 25, 2015

Development time and a niche market for doing it.

freakdiablo · Mar 25, 2015

petteyg359 said:
No such issue exists. Any application can very easily distinguish between any number of connected keyboards and mice, if they want to, just as they can differentiate multiple connected screens (assuming nothing like Eyefinity is pretending they're just one big screen, of course). The Windows APIs for that aren't complicated in the least compared to implementing a game engine.

Huh, was it ever an issue? I do remember hearing that it was a PITA (even semi-impossible) at one point.

Bishoff · Mar 25, 2015

I think it comes down there's just not enough demand for split screen from the community as they expect most PC game players are using multiple machines anyway. A La Lan Party.

motherboard1 · Mar 28, 2015

freakdiablo said:
Huh, was it ever an issue? I do remember hearing that it was a PITA (even semi-impossible) at one point.

We played with an Xboxone controller and a Logitech PS3 style controller. You can also have one player on mouse/keyboard. It was very easy to setup and very customizable in terms of resolutions and other display arrangements. It's really just the game running twice on one machine and one player selecting to connect to the other players game. The mod just runs few commands to make a save/profile folder for the additional players and set controller offsets.

petteyg359 said:
Why let four people play the same $60 copy of a game when you can get them to buy four copies for $240? EA-style management happened to co-op gaming, that's what.

Maybe that's their angle but in this age of entertainment saturation, why does everyone just want to reach the bar? There was a massive horde of posters on the dyeing light forum pleading for Local co-op to be included, I mean countless threads at one point before release, but they were denied. To this day the feature is not for sale, not even for $60 dollars.

Can anyone guess how many copies of dyeing light I bought? Or how many Extra gaming Rigs I bought to play them on? If it had Local Co-op it would have be in my game library day one.

Borderlands 1 , 2 & The Pre-sequel, are proof in my eyes of how easy this feature should be to implement. I also contend that If a player introduces another player to a game with Local Coop, it is more likely that the 2nd player will go buy the game, not less. This has been evident my whole life growing up. My friends always wound up buying games they'd been introduced to by me, even though they'd played them extensively at my house. And vice versa with me.

petteyg359 · Mar 28, 2015

motherboard1 said:
We played with an Xboxone controller and a Logitech PS3 style controller. You can also have one player on mouse/keyboard. It was very easy to setup and very customizable in terms of resolutions and other display arrangements. It's really just the game running twice on one machine and one player selecting to connect to the other players game. The mod just runs few commands to make a save/profile folder for the additional players and set controller offsets.

Maybe that's their angle but in this age of entertainment saturation, why does everyone just want to reach the bar? There was a massive horde of posters on the dyeing light forum pleading for Local co-op to be included, I mean countless threads at one point before release, but they were denied. To this day the feature is not for sale, not even for $60 dollars.

Can anyone guess how many copies of dyeing light I bought? Or how many Extra gaming Rigs I bought to play them on? If it had Local Co-op it would have be in my game library day one.

Borderlands 1 , 2 & The Pre-sequel, are proof in my eyes of how easy this feature should be to implement. I also contend that If a player introduces another player to a game with Local Coop, it is more likely that the 2nd player will go buy the game, not less. This has been evident my whole life growing up. My friends always wound up buying games they'd been introduced to by me, even though they'd played them extensively at my house. And vice versa with me.

Want to read about it in a bigger context than EA and games? Pick up any article from major news outlets recently about the detriments that MBAs have been to every business segment. Some people are realizing how dumb it is to treat your customers as bags of money instead of customers.

Firey_chasm · Apr 1, 2015

I am hoping Valve will try and combat this with a new steam feature,

Allow us to boot two versions of the same game in split screen mode. That way we don't need any fancy code to be built into games, we can let steam do the heavy lifting so long as we have the hardware power to back it up

EarthDog · Apr 1, 2015

I would imagine that even now a lot of people do not have a PC hooked up to their large monitors (talking TV's). Playing split screen on anything south of 27" (and even then you both should be a few feet away at most) is difficult. There just isn't a large market for it as was mentioned earlier.

petteyg359 · Apr 1, 2015

EarthDog said:
I would imagine that even now a lot of people do not have a PC hooked up to their large monitors (talking TV's). Playing split screen on anything south of 27" (and even then you both should be a few feet away at most) is difficult. There just isn't a large market for it as was mentioned earlier.

Hardly. It's not like we didn't play split-screen Mario Kart on old 19" TVs, and split-screen Wacky Wheels on 15" computer monitors. With today's 1920x1080 screen having 9 times the pixels that old 640x480 256-color "2D graphics accelerator" offered, screen size isn't much of an excuse. In the same size, you can pack much finer detail now. Heck, you used to have to share opposite sides of the single keyboard for that stuff. Now we have USB and can plug in as many controllers as we want.

EarthDog · Apr 1, 2015

The smallest I played MK on was a 32", I have to be honest! Its not the details that gets me, its the size of the screen, literally, that irks me. Perhaps I was a spoiled console gamer growing up?

petteyg359 · Apr 2, 2015

EarthDog said:
The smallest I played MK on was a 32", I have to be honest! Its not the details that gets me, its the size of the screen, literally, that irks me. Perhaps I was a spoiled console gamer growing up?

That, or I'm older than I thought... Get Wacky Wheels from Archive.org's collection if they've got it and you never played it

My cousins and I used to play WW split screen on tiny CRTs sharing the single keyboard

Why Are Developers withholding splitscreen/dual screen.

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