The Day the Multiplayer Died

p3t3r

New member
Apr 16, 2009
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i love split screen best ever i was playing MW2 split screen yesterday way better than online.
 

Alias42

New member
Sep 10, 2009
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I totally agree! It sucks if your having people over and the only thing you can do is let ONE person play while the rest watches or decides this sucks and goes and get drunk.
 

ObsessiveSketch

Senior Member
Nov 6, 2009
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I always hated split-screen. The brawlers and fighting games are best; no 'screen-watching,' no squinting at itty-bitty HUDs squished into the corner...I do miss LAN gaming though.
That Starcraft 2 doesn't support LAN is a pretty bad blow, considering my roommate and I are both RTS players. Now we have to go through the whole online Battle.net thing, just to connect to the person sitting 8 ft away.
I never had much experience with bots. I know that Valve is trying something with TF2. It's not perfect, but they're tweaking it based on gamer input, so at least that's something.
 

mobsterlobster

New member
Sep 13, 2009
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I very rarely play online multiplayer because I like playing with people I know, and it's hard enough knowing enough people who have the same system and the same game as me. So I enjoy it when my friends come round and we can all play together, in the same room, drinking and talking together. We hardly ever play on the Xbox 360 now. If there's two of us, fine, Left 4 Dead is fun, but there is no excuse why there's no 4 player local multiplayer for Left 4 Dead. So we play on the Wii. And now my friends want Wiis. They don't want Xbox 360s, they want Wiis.
 

CowboyfromHell666

New member
Jan 14, 2010
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Yeah split screen needs to come back. Not everyone has Xbox Live or PSN to play against other people. Then again, not everyone has 3 friends so they need bots. Both would be great to see as a must feature for FPSes of the future.
 

Crops

Probably more bored than you
Aug 16, 2009
92
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I firmly believe this is simply marketing sneaking into your games unnoticed.

Like the games that used to be on your mobile phone. Solitaire, minesweeper or whatever.
The last phone I bought had no games, it had 30 second demos and a link to the site where I could go and purchase solitaire, with actual money.

As for the multiplayer issue;
4-player splitscreen is 1 copy sold. No splitscreen probably isn't 4 copies sold, but at least it will be more than 1. Also, everyone playing the game will have paid the full price.
Eventually, we will grow accustomed enough to online play that it becomes a necessity in gaming. Which will be the point where the price of your subscription is tripled.

Other than the income thing, it's also a piracy thing. Forcing people to play online effectively forces them to actually buy the game, or go through a lot of trouble getting the latest "untraceable" console mod that could get your account banned the second the next update hits.

The fact that it took this thread for a lot of people to realise "Hey wait, splitscreen is gone" already shows how much a lot of people really care.
I'll bet the vast majority of gamers (that aren't sharing a console) only own 1 controller per system, except for their Wii perhaps.
Any possible second controller was either given to them for free, is a collectible, or is commonly extremely busy collecting dust.
 

Shadowflame66

Ex-SOLDIER
Feb 13, 2010
29
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Splinter Cell Conviction has a lot of split-screen co-op stuff, and even a versus mode which is pretty awesome. The main campaign is single-player, however, the co-op campaign is quite long in and of itself, my friend and I only finished about a fourth of it in one sitting.

And besides that there's other modes that are good for replay value because they're not static, like the mode that's player-vs-player but with a bunch of enemies in it as well. All in all it's a pretty good split-screen game, though I wouldn't mind more appearing.

I've always said co-op can improve any game. Why Ininity Ward didn't do full co-op throughout their campaign, when you already have an AI partner in pretty much all missions anyway, I'll never know.
 

Cody211282

New member
Apr 25, 2009
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I love local multiplayer and local coop, but they both seem to be disappearing and that sucks. I think that's fine if you want online play as well but don't just leave out local, what I think is it's just the companys trying to make a few more sales because now your friends have to buy the game and get online if they want to play with you.
 

HaloHappy

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Sep 7, 2008
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We need more games like Gears 2, Perfect Dark, and UT3. Games with offline bots you can play against for people like me without Live. Its not like it wouldn't work with some, any game is better with bots, I hope Bungie add them to Reach as an option.
 

Mr. Mike

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Mar 24, 2010
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As I've noticed, almost no PS3 exclusives have any split-screen options. They all push the visuals instead, so that having more than one player playing would slow down the PS3 and wouldn't be feasible. I mean, it's fine for me because I rarely have friends over (always go to someone else's, my house sucks), but for other people it must be a pain. Killzone 2 would've been mad with split-screen.

And Uncharted 2's co-op? The perfect recipe for couch awesomeness, but they pushed the visuals so hard that running more than one instance of the game on a screen would implode the PS3. Such a pity.
 

fanklok

Legendary Table User
Jul 17, 2009
2,355
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I hearken for the days gone by when me and my friends would sit on a tiny couch for 6 hours playing Smash Brother's or Goldeneye. The nameless faceless gamers on XBL are still fun, but it just isn't the same.
 

duchaked

New member
Dec 25, 2008
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as much as I love some of the experiences found in single player campaigns, at the end of the day, it's the co-op and splitscreen features that really make the game worth keeping...and more recently for me, worth buying at all
 

HuCast

New member
Aug 18, 2006
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Thats why I liked Tom Chicks "Shoot Club" so much. He wrote about the paradise we were thrown out of :(
 

bob311

New member
Apr 18, 2010
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I just read it and i was hit by the reality. it is very sad, i could almost cry. i do believe in online multiplayer very much, but it is nothing compared to the buddy next to me.
 

ZZoMBiE13

Ate My Neighbors
Oct 10, 2007
1,908
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It's good to know I'm not the only one who misses the Split Screen experience. I know the developers (and more to the point, the publishers) want everyone who plays to be forced into buying a copy of the game for themselves, but gaming has always been (and should remain) a social experience.

Online modes are great and all that, but at the end of the day I want to get a friend or two and beat up the Covenant with my friends right by my side the way I did in Halo 1 more than I want to challenge screaming children who apparently never learned how to behave when other people are around.

i.e.:
My best friend calling me a tosser when I blast him with a tank seconds after he respawns onto the battlefield= A-OK superfun goodtimes and laughter for all!

Some 13yr old stranger calling me a tosser (or worse, a cheater) because I beat him fair and square and he can't handle it= A big steaming turd of an evening that will never be very fun.
 

omega247

New member
Apr 12, 2010
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Ahh, I remember the good ol' days of all night four player perfect dark sessions (with loads of bots) to the sounds of the Marshall Mathers album :D