There aren’t many games with split-screen support these days. One of those was set to be For Honor, the upcoming third-person brawler from Ubisoft. But in a video, the developers have announced that the feature is being cut.
The announcement was buried within an internal interview For Honor producer Stephane Cardin. According to him, it was “critical” that the studio made the call to drop split-screen at this stage of development given that the game is due out in February.
“We decided this week to cut the split-screen … when we look at what needs to be done to support online co-op, for us it was critical to make the decision now so we can polish all the features at the AAA level and so we have the most amazing experience,” Cardin revealed.
Ubisoft had previously rolled out developers in years past to defend split-screen, so its removal is interesting. It’s also perhaps an admission that supporting split-screen is a lot more technically challenging, particularly when online modes become involved.
A closed beta for For Honor will kick off presumably before the end of the year, although a precise date hasn’t been announced.
Comments
10 responses to “For Honor Cuts Split-Screen”
well that’s a shame. split screen was the feature that made this a must-buy for me.
Same here. Bummer.
#BringBackSplitscreenGames
Well that’s a lost sale from me.. I was hyped about sitting on the couch with a friend and playing, but fuck the consumer right? why sell one copy when you can sell two. It pisses me off when devs give a pissweak excuses like this just to sell more copies. So many games have just moved local co-op into post publish so they could focus on the main development before the release. It can be done, but ubi$oft are the new EA anyway, so what did i expect
I’m a huge fan of split screen, but I think the cost of getting the thing to actually work in splitscreen vs the amount of people who actually want it is prohibitive in most modern games.
Serious question: what is so complicated about SS?
Itself isn’t complicated… it’s that you are having to render every frame twice simultaneously, from a different angle on the same piece of hardware. That can include the lighting, physics, animations, collision detection, hit boxing, and a bunch of other things I’m not smart enough to understand.
Basically, doing twice the work on one set of hardware means that something is going to have to be sacrificed… that could include the frame rate, or the resolution (dynamically scaling resolution is currently in vogue).
Why would you spend the very valuable time trying to get it working smoothly, for a very small percentage of users?
There’s going to be some who say that it’s because they’d not sell as many copies if multiple people could play off the same machine, and that they’ve been incentivised to drop it by Sony/Microsoft because they make money from online subscriptions… oh, and the obligatory calls of lazy devs.Sounds like they are under the pump to get it finished on time.
That’s my read on it too.
Well, if the game isn’t perfectly polished and bug-free they will have a lot of explaining to do.