And what did Battlefront become? A great family game. Maybe not all of the reason, it’s a gorgeous, accessible Star Wars shooter, so that’s probably the bulk of it, but Battlefront had split-screen play in an age when almost no other shooters bother. It’s also why I think Star Wars Battlefront was such a success. This is why the Wii U has actually been a pretty good system, as some of its best games allow multiple people to play at the same time, from Smash Bros. But the experience has been completely and utterly diminished by the fact that there’s no split-screen. While we may be a society that communicates remotely more often than ever now, we have not evolve into this isolated species that never sees each other in person. But I’m sorry, I still just don’t buy it.

Online play makes local play less in-demand. Games are more graphically demanding now so making them split-screen sacrifices resolution and framerate. Its absence has not really been discussed after.Īnd yet, here I am with this enormous, beautiful TV, where any one of the four quadrants on a four-player split screen would be better quality than anything I played on growing up.

Its inclusion was never discussed before the game. Overwatch was just released on consoles, a clean, cartoony, team-based shooter that seems like it could easily allow for split-screen co-op play, yet it doesn’t have it. Every time a new shooter came out, there would be outrage that it too had abandoned split-screen, but now, no one ever bats an eyelash, myself included. I used to complain about this a lot more, and I wasn’t alone.

Just cause 2 split screen