"Why ‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops 3’ Kept Its Split-Screen Multiplayer"
Halo 5: Guardians recently phased out its own split-screen multiplayer in pursuit of a higher framerate, and long-time fans aren’t pleased. But all is not lost! The other major shooter of the season, Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, still supports that traditional couch experience for those that want it. I caught up a little bit with Dan Bunting, the multiplayer director at Call of Duty developer Treyarch, on why split-screen local multiplayer was still important for a shooter here in 2015.
Just so we’re clear, which modes support split screen and how many players?
In Black Ops 3, you can play all of our modes of play: Campaign, Multiplayer and Zombies, in both local and online split-screen. You can play through the Campaign in 2-player split-screen, local and online. Both Multiplayer and Zombies support 4-player local split-screen, and 2-player split-screen online.
Did you have any trouble hitting performance targets with local multiplayer?
Split-screen gameplay will always present technical challenges, because it renders everything that you see on the screen two to four times, depending on how many players you have locally. So, of course, split-screen play pushes the limits of any generation’s console technology. With Black Ops 3, we completely overhauled our graphics engine to support advanced features like deferred rendering, order-independent transparency, which is basically more and better-looking particles, volumetric FX and dynamic lighting. It’s the power of this new technology, along with the greater capabilities of this generation of consoles and PC, that allows for a more scalable system to support split-screen play. In short, it’s actually easier now than it has ever been, and we believe it is worth it for the fun social experience it provides for our players.
You may need to take some advice and consulting from this guys.
After all they need to develop the game for all platforms while you guys only have a single platform to focus on.
BTW I do not like CoD and I will not buy BO3 but I want to show that this is still completely doable and could have been and could be implemented in Halo 5 if you guys put the resources to do so.
As for the rest.
Flame on.