I was digging up some of the interviews before the release of Halo 5 and found out that the reason as to why split screen was taken out of the project was that “60 frames per second are required in order for the game to run”. Obviously, it wasn’t precisely this, but 343 employees tried to say something along these lines.
Now, if you take a look at Team Arena, you’ll find that the game runs capped at 60fps, mainly because all of the maps present in that playlist were made to emphasize the competitive aspect of the game, thus needing the smooth framerate. However, as soon as the player goes to BTB or any other playlist that features forge maps, he/she will immediatelly notice that the framerate isn’t stable. The best part of this is that the game is still playable – nothing breaks, it’s just at a lower performance.
Conclusion: was it really necessary to take out an entire feature because of a standard that has been quietly broken? I clearly don’t have any experiences with game development, but I strongly believe that 30fps dual player splitscreen was able to exist in developer-made maps. It’s an entirely new context in Forge, but I think that if it were limited to dev maps, split screen could have been in the game.
Anyway, I know that there’s a thread whose objective is to deal only with split screen, but that’s not what I want to discuss. Hopefully something like this can be studied before the release of Halo 6.