But there are just so few that I can play with friends, and Halo was supposed to be the last safeguard of that tradition. There are more high quality releases that are out more often than ever before. Nostalgia aside, I think games are getting better. Some of my favorite games ever are single player, and more often than not competitive multiplayer is too intense for me these days.īut with that said, this trend of making almost every game in the industry a “social” activity that can only be played by someone in another room on another TV using another console is making gaming a lot less fun overall than it used to be. Hell, I enjoyed my 100 hours of solitude with The Witcher 3 immensely, and never once thought if I was missing out on some sort of co-op capability there. I’m all for the isolation of video games when it suits me. Otherwise, gaming together is nothing more than a spectator sport with one player watching the other and waiting for their 'turn.'

To play with him, like in so many other games these days, I have to send him home so he can play on his own console, and I have to talk to him through a garbled headset mic. Halo is not alone in this of course, this is already happening with a game like Bungie's Destiny, which is entirely based around group activities, yet I cannot play co-op when my friend stops by. When Halo 5 is released, it’ll be a sad state of affairs if I have my friends over and we're forced to take turns playing on the big screen while everyone else stands around watching. Either one person has to play on the gamepad, and 4-player split-screen doesn't exist at all. You won’t find split-screen play in a game like Splatoon, however, again because of technical limitations. But even Nintendo is starting to succumb to the trend. If I have that same group of friends over today, what do we play? Our options are far more limited than they used to be, and we end up playing Mario Kart 8 or Super Smash Bros. Halo 5 ditching split-screen would be a symbolic shift of the entire industry moving away from what made playing video games so fun growing up. Yes, our screens were tiny and we suffered because of it, but it’s honestly the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games, and still is to this day.

My college years were spent playing Halo 3 with three friends, with others rotating in for whoever had the lowest score.

Is halo 5 4 player split screen