Why Split Screen Still Matters

[Shifty Geezer]

There are BF3 coop stages, have you tried them?

I've played 10 minutes of BF3 when a friend showed it. I'm only using it as a reference here because others have raised it. The specifics are immaterial - local coop can be supported in lots of ways to cater for lots of tastes, and devs shouldn't avoid it if they feel they can't capture a particular style of experience.

 

[Davros]

In the Gaming Machine of the Gods space (aka: the pc) with eyefinity/nvsurround 2 screens can be presented to the games as a single screen so split screen actually means 2 players on 1 pc each with their own monitor

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Multiple monitor support from the same console would also be a good idea, although as I say above, I think tablets with HDMI in would be the best option as the easiest system to assemble instead of lugging monitors around. Is there an HDMI protocol for daisychaining displays so they count as separate devices? I'm guessing not.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I really think it's because developers are so focused on the kind of experience they want to create they forget that it doesn't mean other experiences are "bad." Like I'm pretty sure an 4 Humans + 4 Idiots vs 56 Idiots match isn't the Battlefield experience anyone at DICE imagined. So I'm guessing from the developer's point of view, they've got in their heads things going a certain way, so when they don't, they think, "Oh, this is really bad. Just awful. Leave this in, and people are going to be disappointed by such an incomplete, second-rate piece of garbage. Best to take it out." They forget that a lot of times, the way the gamer wants to play the game isn't the way the developer intended...and that's okay!

You can see this in interviews with Treyarch before Black Ops came out. They viewed people not playing online as a problem to be solved. The bot mode was intended to entice people to play online, but instead what a lot of people did was just play against the bots. Fortunately, they responded to the market and added the bots to the split-screen multiplayer via a patch.

 

[Davros]

Bots when done well can be awesome (see unreal tournament)
I prefer an UT botmatch to live
they dont cheat, they dont engage in ass clownery, one of them suddenly doesn't decide to constantly tell the rest of the bots how gay they are and they are always available.

 

[tuna]

I've played 10 minutes of BF3 when a friend showed it. I'm only using it as a reference here because others have raised it. The specifics are immaterial - local coop can be supported in lots of ways to cater for lots of tastes, and devs shouldn't avoid it if they feel they can't capture a particular style of experience.

I do not think the BF3 devs avoid local coop, it is just that those resources could be used to make the main game better. BF3 is a game that is very unsuited to local coop and bots and to implement those would take a lot of resources.

 

[tuna]

I really think it's because developers are so focused on the kind of experience they want to create they forget that it doesn't mean other experiences are "bad." Like I'm pretty sure an 4 Humans + 4 Idiots vs 56 Idiots match isn't the Battlefield experience anyone at DICE imagined. So I'm guessing from the developer's point of view, they've got in their heads things going a certain way, so when they don't, they think, "Oh, this is really bad. Just awful. Leave this in, and people are going to be disappointed by such an incomplete, second-rate piece of garbage. Best to take it out." They forget that a lot of times, the way the gamer wants to play the game isn't the way the developer intended...and that's okay!

Do you actually think that DICE has implemented bots in BF3 (for all platforms) but just did not show that feature to the BF3 players?

 

[tuna]

Bots when done well can be awesome (see unreal tournament)
I prefer an UT botmatch to live
they dont cheat, they dont engage in ass clownery, one of them suddenly doesn't decide to constantly tell the rest of the bots how gay they are and they are always available.

Do you think bots would work as well in BF3?

 

[TEEDA]

original SSX was one of those games I spent many hours with splitscreen gaming when it was released on PS2. I really regreted the lack of the splitscreen option in the latest iteration this gen.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Bots were fun in Quake III, too. If it were really a matter of competitive multiplayer being the be-all, end-all of gaming, PezBot for COD4 and W@W wouldn't even exist. It actually seems like you're more likely to get bots in a PC game than a console game, despite likely far more PC gamers having Internet connections.

Do you actually think that DICE has implemented bots in BF3 (for all platforms) but just did not show that feature to the BF3 players?

As said before, they were in BF2. No one said or implied they were part of a BF3 build at some point. Rather, Patrick Bach explicitly said they didn't make it into BF3 because they look at the bot experience as being crappy, sub-par version of a COD-style single player campaign:

Sebastian Stange: In former battlefield games you always had matches with bots for training. Do you intend to do that again for Battlefield 3?

Patrick Bach: No. We won't have bot-matches in the same way. We think that bot-matches were kind of a emergency solution for Battlefield 2. It wasn't the dream scenario even back then. Then again we were much smaller and we didn't have all the resources that we wanted to have. Now we have it and we want to create a great campaign, where we can create more drama and create more things as you saw on screen here [presentation at the GDC 2011]. If we weren't allowed to do this because of the Battlefield 2 heritage I think we would do something very wrong. I think this is the right way of moving forward with the Battlefield franchise and again … I want people to understand that we don't want to dump down the multiplayer and we don't want to create a worse multiplayer just because we make singleplayer. It's about creating the full experience.

http://www.pcgames.de/Battlefield-3...ts-Server-Probleme-und-Call-of-Duty-814499/4/

The problem with your theory that no one would have fun with bots in BF3 is that bots were in BF2, and they were fun in that game.

 

[Acert93]

Could they enter/exit vehicles? Decide where to spawn? Change loadout?

Yes, they use vehicles.

Yes, they spawned at the various capture points.

Yes, they used the various classes.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Got to try my CON last night and it was excellent gaming. Lots of teamwork and talking through actions. Lots of silly moments of the camera getting stuck and someone going the wrong way leading to death, but a run back to the checkpoint brought everyone back. Where CON scores very highly in coop is being pretty open. We were allowed to play four mages, and not forced to play different characters, plus we were allowed to start level 1 characters at any difficulty level (after playing through once). In a more traditional play through with four different characters at normal difficulty, the ranger tends to kill everything before the melee fighters can get a look in, but sidestepping the official design for a custom variation made for a much better experience.

It's also worth looking at Snowblind's later games and where they went wrong. Justice League Heroes was only two player and forced the character selection in some levels in order to preserve the story. That's fine on a first playthrough, but everyone complained at the limitation and how they weren't allowed to play their favourite DC hero all the way through. LOTR:War in the North is similarly story bound, forcing a choice between one of three classes. And it was just a pretty weak game too.

I dare say the way to provide a stellar local coop experience is pretty easy, if you've got the split-screen or shared-screen mechanics working. Just open up parameters for players to select and let the play around finding the best fit for them. Don't worry about balancing it because the players will be able to balance it themselves.

 

[Arwin]

I just want to reiterate, for the hell of it, that the dynamic split screen in the lego games is outright fantastic.

Also, I think this is why Horde mode gameplay is so popular these days. Much more 'sandboxy' and forcing you to work together.

Also, your comments play to the too much story in modern games bit.

 

[tuna]

Yes, they use vehicles.

Yes, they spawned at the various capture points.

Yes, they used the various classes.

Do they enter/exit vehicles? Do they change loadout based on the map?

 

[fearsomepirate]

I'm not sure what you think "use vehicles" means, tuna.

You know, you can make an AI do almost anything. Telling it what loadouts to use on a given map is probably the easiest part, you just encode the variables in the map file. Or you just tell the bots to randomly choose kits and let things happen as they may.

I'm also not sure where you're getting this idea that programming an AI to have certain conditions where it uses or stops using a vehicle is an insurmountable task. They did it in BF2 and BF2142. The AI in Just Cause 2 can do it. There are user mods for Tribes 2 where the bots will use the vehicles.

Of course the AI isn't human. You'll always find something you can do that it hasn't been programmed to do. But it's not necessary for an AI to be humanly clever in order to be functional in a game.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Also, your comments play to the too much story in modern games bit.

Yes, I noticed the crossover. The idea of opening up variables for local coop to eveolve extends to the solo experience too. By all means create the uber cinematic super story game extravaganza, but then let the player just play with the game mechanics after that to have fun expeiences. It seems a very cheap way to add value to a game to me.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I think there's a unifying theme here--developers need to let gamers play the way we want to play instead of trying to force the gamers to play the way they think we ought to play. There are so many examples of developers failing to do this and not being responsive to gamers. An example of more or less doing it right is the COD series, which has been steadily increasing rather than decreasing the ways you can play and responding to consumer behavior since early on.

 

[tuna]

I'm not sure what you think "use vehicles" means, tuna.

You know, you can make an AI do almost anything. Telling it what loadouts to use on a given map is probably the easiest part, you just encode the variables in the map file. Or you just tell the bots to randomly choose kits and let things happen as they may.

I'm also not sure where you're getting this idea that programming an AI to have certain conditions where it uses or stops using a vehicle is an insurmountable task. They did it in BF2 and BF2142. The AI in Just Cause 2 can do it. There are user mods for Tribes 2 where the bots will use the vehicles.

Of course the AI isn't human. You'll always find something you can do that it hasn't been programmed to do. But it's not necessary for an AI to be humanly clever in order to be functional in a game.

Well, it seems to be a lot of work for the core engineering people at least.

 

[Acert93]

Do they enter/exit vehicles? Do they change loadout based on the map?

Yes, they have to run slowly to a vehicle just like you--and when you have their vehicle near death they often try to bail, just like a normal newb

As for load outs, '42/DC had 5 load out slots and they used them all. Now they are dumb AI so they were not the best at selection but you would have snipers and anti-armor, etc and they would use all the vehicles.

 

[Arwin]

Incidentally I played the full version of Foosball on PS3 today and it does support local same screen 4 player.

I can't recommend this one enough if you have Move controllers, just great fun.