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Is This the End of Splitscreen Multiplayer, Or the Start of Its Rebirth?
An anonymous reader writes "A new history of splitscreen multiplayer looks at how the phenomenon went from arcade necessity to console selling point, and eventually evolved into today's online multiplayer networks like Xbox Live. The article digs up some surprising anecdotes along the way — like the fact that the seminal Goldeneye N64 deathmatch mode was very much an afterthought, given to a trainee who needed something to do. It's also interesting to think about where it's going in the future, with 4k displays on the horizon and handheld screens making inroads to living room gaming. 'I think you’ll see innovations this year that let people use their TV and mobile device in very interesting ways,' says Wipeout creator Nick Burcombe. 'It doesn't even need to be complex to recapture that social aspect – it just needs to involve more than one person in the same room. ‘Second Screen’ gaming could be multiplayer-based for sure, but it can also be used for new gameplay mechanics in single player too.'"
I agree that it is a whole lot more fun, even if you only have two people, to have them in the same room. You get that whole extra level of trash talking, finger gesturing, head slapping, etc. that you can't get over a headset. This is especially true on something like the Wii where you have multiple people either on the same screen (like the Mario games), or in a split screens (like in Wii Sports). Plus, it is just nice to have a multiplayer mode where you don't need to connect to an online server.
I have really fond memories of playing C&C at my friends house on PS1 via link cable, as well as a variety of other games that we played via split screen (I even remember some being 4 screen using a "multitap").
Maybe it's just nostalgia talking, but there's definitely something about being in the same room as the people you are playing with/against, and proper lan parties are a pain.
There are a few problems with split screen:
On the same device
* Needs a powerful GPU that can render 2x amount of work across 2 different monitors. 2Kp (aka 4K) is rendering 4x amount of detail !
Across multiple devices
* Needs to handle input latency
* Needs to make the rendering stays relatively in sync across varying framerates
While pretending like the Wii U doesn't exist. Yes, I'm sure 2014 will be the year where having a second screen off the TV is a gaming essential for the next generation of gamers. Unlike 2012/2013 when everyone hated that idea and thought Nintendo was stupid for trying it.
Born to Play
Okay, not really. But I was just lamenting last night how because of Xbox live/PSN, people don't get together to game as much.
In the dreamcast/early xbox days, my friends and I would get together at one of our houses (all young adults without real adult responsibilities yet other than feeding ourselves and paying the rent) and play games all the time. A couple at a time on the couch playing while the others in the group joked, watched, BSed and did other things. My wife participated in the discussion of those games even though she never played, just because of the environment.
Now, its net games and while 2 of us may talk about it, the 6 or so of our little click no longer has the conversation we once had. People not playing the game are simply not part of the game. And yes, my wife could pull up a console/laptop and 'watch' me play ... but thats pretty lame.
The fun part of gaming to me was when my friends and I got together, same physical location, and played. It was really just like board games. Something cool would happen, like a cool trick in Tony Hawk, or that really smooth Top Gun like 'put on the brakes and he'll fly right by me' move you pulled off in Descent, and everyone, winner, loser, and non-players would get excited. It was like a mini sporting event.
Hell, even finding out why you just not beat one of your friends time after time is because he kept looking at your half of the screen was 'fun' as you all laughed about it afterwords. Wall-hacks don't have the same pleasure after the fact when it comes out.
You don't get any of that with net gaming. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE net games, but split screen, 5-6 of your friends sitting on the couch TOGETHER playing ... THEN eating together or something ... You don't see that anymore and that was just freaking awesome.
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A new game was recently announced on the Xbox that will provide 6-player split-screen running at 60fps. I'm really excited for this because I am hoping it will spark other developers to emulate it. I'd settle for less visuals if the game is fun and can incorporate more players. Sadly, more players per game can mean less copies sold, so I suspect that will hold back any possible adoption.
Splitscreen: 4 people want to play, so they buy a copy.
No Splitscreen: 4 people want to play, so they have to buy 4 copies.
Guess what's more interesting for the company making the game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On the same device
* Needs a powerful GPU
How so? Split-screen in a racing game or first-person shooter can use lower-detail meshes and lower-detail textures: four 960x540 pixel windows on a 1080p screen or four 1080p windows on a 4K screen. And because the pixel count remains constant, you can use the same pixel shaders to keep the same fill rate. Besides, not all same-screen multiplayer is split-screen. Fighting games, cooperative platformers, and shmups, for example, put 2 to 4 players' characters in one view.
Yes and the answer is "no and no"
Are the inevitable people bitching about another player watching their screen.
Guess what? We can all see each other's screens. No one has an advantage here. Learn to use the information at your disposal, and learn to minimize what the other players can get from you.
Beyond that, today we have both the screen size and the resolution to allow each player to have more size and pixels than they'd have had with an entire screen to themselves just a few generations back. As long as your friends aren't the aforementioned whiny douches it's so much more fun to be in the same room.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
It requires real hardware.
We had splitscreen before the 360 and PS3, let alone the Xbone and PS4.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I've spent the past several years working on an article summarizing the arguments for and against split-screen that I've seen on Slashdot and elsewhere. The big problem I can see is that startup studios have a hard time getting onto a platform that allows single-screen multiplayer: desktop PCs by and large aren't in the living room (with a few exceptions that Hairyfeet will probably explain), Steam Machines aren't out yet, OUYA flopped, and the major consoles require developers to have the sort of experience that one can only gain by moving to a place like Austin, Boston, or Seattle.
Can you tell me which fairy land you live in because in Canada, under 20$K is poor.
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Screen peeking was solved years ago by introducing cooperative multiplayer, as opposed to having every FPS be a deathmatch.
Doomers and Quakeworlders thought your GoldenEye and Halo were cute. I guess they still are. It always seemed to me like an excuse to not learn how to network computers, coz all that tech stuff is SO hard and for nerds. I'm confused why this is a news article. Hexen, anyone? Off my lawn. Where did I put my teeth?
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Microsoft has an app called SmartGlass that lets a player use a smartphone or tablet as a second screen and controller for an Xbox family console. But one problem with SmartGlass is that though tablets are ideal for positional control, very few phones and tablets have the discrete buttons needed for solid directional control. The only ones I can think of are Sony's Xperia Play, NV's Shield, Archos GamePad, and various obscure JXD products.
friends scatter to various states and countries over their lifetimes. Thanks to online gaming, I can get together to game with friends that I haven't seen IRL in years
Even friend matches are reportedly hard to arrange when the friends move to different time zones. This is why a lot of people rely on pickup matches with strangers. (See CronoCloud's comment and Meg Wolitzer's article.)
If stuff like the Occulus or Sony's new headset catch on, it may supplant single-split-screen multiplayer with single-console-multi-screen gaming for a lot of purposes.
I wonder how many headsets your average PC/console could drive.
There's less of an excuse now to not bring your own box
If one player owns a copy of Counter-Strike and the other a copy of Unreal, they can't play multiplayer despite the games being so similar (both first-person shooters) that basic skills will transfer. Back when 2D fighting games were popular, you might have a Street Fighter game at one house and a Mortal Kombat at the other.
Besides, to what extent can households with more than one gamer afford multiple copies of each game?
You've summarised the hardware purist argument pretty well. However, Sony and MS both had good reasons for pitching their technology at the level they did.
First, they'd waited more than long enough already to replace their old hardware. The 360/PS3 generation was the longest console generation on record and almost certainly ran longer than was good for either Sony or MS's business. It gave PC gaming (remember when that was dying) a shot in the arm to the point where it started eating the consoles' lunch and it resulted in a sales-fatigue for games that did a lot of commercial harm to a lot of developers. The story of the last 18 months of the 360 and PS3 was "new title launches, sales massively underperform previous game from that developer/previous game in the series". If they'd waited another year or two, home console gaming might actually have died - or at least, MS and Sony may have lost their place in it (Nintendo are functionally irrelevant now anyway).
Second, they have to think about hardware unit price. Push the spec too high and your unit price rises to the point where consumers lose interest. Sony have been burned before with the PS3 on launching with a high price tag and taking too long to get sales momentum as a result.
Third, you have to think about what games developers are actually capable of producing. The jump to the 720p average on the 360/PS3 was horribly difficult for most developers and the increase in costs wiped many out. The jump to the XB-One/PS4 hardware will be hard enough for developers. Few, if any of them, are in a position to finance games that would make good use of 4k resolutions.
Splitscreen: Our household buys one copy.
No Splitscreen: Our household buys no copies, knowing that the game will be useless at family parties.
The 360/PS3 generation was the longest console generation on record
Was it longer than the second generation, which started with the Atari 2600 and ended with the NES?
When you're 39 you're more likely to have fathered or given birth to children who are also gamers. Split-screen means you don't have to stay on the upgrade treadmill for two PCs or two consoles.
They should make split screen games that take advantage of 3D screens; each person wears only one type of lens allowing them to see just their screen.
My Vizio VX32L television has two different picture-in-picture modes: the traditional mode where the smaller picture is inset and a side-by-side mode where both pictures are squeezed into 4:3. It can show TV (composite, S-Video, or ATSC) and component (YPbPr or VGA), TV and digital (HDMI or DVI), or component and digital. This means I can run a GameCube with S-Video out and Wii with component out at once; I've done this before with Animal Crossing for GameCube. Or I can run two PCs, one with VGA out and one with HDMI out. Or I can run a race with the NES version of a game (composite) on one side and the Wii Virtual Console version on the other
Quite a few of my friends used to get together and have Halo bouts in split screen during high school, and we would even link up 4 xboxes and TVs in the same room to have 8v8 matches.
The key statement being "high school". We see a lot of "I did goldeneye/halo at college" comments over the years, but then you realize that once you're no longer in school and share schedules and living space with lots of people in the same age/interest bracket, it becomes harder to do.
I've always been a fan of his: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... pretty much split screen as full screen through a passive 3D tv when you switch up the lenses in the glasses.
Then I guess it depends on which regional market we're talking about. The NES wasn't out in Slashdot's home country until 1985. In 1983 it was still the Family Computer, and Nintendo was searching for a distributor to bring it stateside during the great gaming recession of 1983-1984. In the States, the second gen lasted from 1977 to 1985, and the seventh from 2005 to 2012. It also depends on whether you group the TurboGrafx-16 with the NES or with the Super NES.
No, not buying new games means you don't have to stay on the upgrade treadmill (assuming you didn't buy a game that has stupid DRM schemes)
Online multiplayer usually "has stupid DRM schemes". For example, Xbox games no longer work online after Microsoft made a patch to Xbox Live that was incompatible with the original Xbox.
Actually, this would be a great idea for an adapter. 4 HDMI ports coming in, 1 going out with a selector to chose the output format. You could even have it support the new 4K displays using multiple HDMI ports or a displayport.
The thing is that it is already starting to bit them in the butt. a LOT of 4K Tv owners are already bitching on forums how their gaming system, or worse the Xbox "media center/gaming system" is useless to them on their shiny new tv (that they cant watch anything at all on as there is no 4K content)
But the complaints and bad press start with the videophiles, and will infect the affluent people that buy game systems. it will actually cause PC gaming to get a better foothold, because you can build a gaming PC to handle 4K right now and play STEAM games on it that will render the video at 4K and look damn good at it.
If anything the 4K rapid adoption by consumers will further destroy console gaming. If Steam has a clue they will make sure they support a high end PC and 4K with their Chrome OS.... and then utterly decimate Sony and Microsoft in the living room.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
True, the generation who grew up with GoldenEye aren't kids anymore. But the GoldenEye generation is having kids, or at least nephews or nieces, and the possibility of sharing the experience with these youngsters once they're of gaming age may help bring back split-screen.
"Rendering equation" as described by the Wikipedia article sounds like what a pixel shader does. But yes, after I posted, I realized that traversing a level's sector graph to produce a potentially visible set doesn't scale based on level of detail. That's also why the developers of GoldenEye had to cut some of its more intricate maps from multiplayer. But I was under the impression that this sort of occlusion culling was more a CPU issue than a GPU issue, as the same amount of geometry gets submitted to the GPU for one high-res camera or four low-res cameras. Or are all 3D engines dominated by occlusion culling?
I'm not so sure how well an external HDMI scaler like what you propose would interact with the HDCP that some consoles require even when playing games.
Try Diablo 3.
http://us.playstation.com/ps3/...
Sony SimulView allows you to view two different HDMI sources on one 3D display. PS3 (and eventually the PS4) has a few games that support SimulView... It splits the 3D source so one angle is one player and the other angle is the other player, both 1080P. There are some fantastic options out there.
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Unexpect the expected!
You do realize that majority of gamers are adults, right?
True, only 18 percent of gamers in 2011 were under 18, but I'd guess a not insignificant fraction of the other 72 percent are gaming with their kids. And if the majors continue to tailor their first-person shooters and gangster simulators to the M-rated market, this leaves the E, E10+, and T markets open.
I'm still amazed that no TV manufacturers have offerd this capability to allow multiple people to watch different shows at the same time.
Unless by this you mean one HDMI program and one ATSC program at once, the subscriber would need to connect multiple cable or satellite boxes to the TV. Viewers would need to wear Bluetooth headphones in addition to the 3D glasses. Another TV is probably more practical.