The Death of Split Screen Gaming

I remember the day as if it was yesterday, November 5^th 2013, the time was 00:00 and I’d gathered a group of friends that usually play games with me round my house because Call of Duty: Ghosts was going live on my PlayStation 3 and we were going to have a ‘sesh’. How wrong we were.

 When we fired the game up at 00:02 when it went live on the PSN Store we all sat there controllers at the ready only to realize the game only supported 1-2 players and had maps built for a much bigger size of party. It was so heartbreaking we went back to Die Rise and gave them Imps a little extra kick.

 I’ve never been a fan or particularly any good at Call of Duty’s twitch shooting mechanics, I much prefer Halo’s fast paced strategy shooting involving shields but that’s just me. I did however enjoy CoD’s local multiplayer and the fact it had the ability to have four players in a room playing together and as my Xbox 360 broke and I purchased a PS3 for my Metal Gear obsession Cod was the way to go.

 Call me old fashioned but I still think local multiplayer is better than online, the overall experience just feels better when there is someone beside you to which you can gloat or hang your head in shame, sure you can gloat over a headset but it doesn’t feel the same.

 You miss the magic that makes multiplayer the experience that has revolutionized gaming in the first place: the mayhem of four player Rust on MW2 when whilst gloating over the sensational throwing knife I just threw at Sam, Adam bursts round the corner and reminds me that this is a small map and there’s no time to gloat, holding a huge lead on sticks and stones only for every one in the room to hunt you down with a throwing axe and get you in the last second, or the look on Adam and Andy’s face as they first go into the ghost house on Buried Zombies and realize these ghosts are creepy.

 All these moments just don’t feel the same sat in my underpants with a head set on drinking a 3 liter bottle of coke and eating a whole cheesecake to myself. It’s perhaps the main reason I haven’t really got into Battlefield, as the only way to play is online and it has no local multiplayer support. Looking at the current line up of games for PS4/X1 I can see it is a trend that’s not going to break anytime soon with Destiny set to break the box office of gamming and most games out this fall being single player based stories. Co-op all of a sudden has been shipped online for Assassins Creed and Far Cry, which never really had a two-player option so maybe this isn’t going to set the trend. 

 This is the reason my Wii U and even my Wii and Gamecube have been getting all my gaming time and I have rekindled my romance my cutesy platformers as I go through a back catalogue of multiplayer and party games with my friends. It just seems like gaming is connecting you to so many people on a massive scale yet you’ve never been more alone.