If the exclusion of local co-op in Halo 5: Guardians has you paranoid about the future of split-screen multiplayer on Xbox One, fear not: Gears of War 4 has it all. The Coalition studio head Rod Fergusson confirmed to Game Informer that the upcoming shooter will support all the same couch-friendly action that you remember.
"Any way that you can play Gears of War 4, you can play it split screen", Fergusson said. "The only thing that will be [different] is that multiplayer is 60 frames, when you play splitscreen it's 30. Just because the scene complexity and everything else with two windows… doing both views at 60 is just not possible for us, at this moment".
To Halo 5's credit, Fergusson quickly added that doing split-screen anything is not a free, easy choice for a developer. Beyond performance issues, it also means thinking about how to handle two sets of audio coming from one set of speakers, how to scale the HUD, and other issues. But "co-op is cake to us, it's what defines us", Fergusson said. "We can never get rid of that".
Fergusson also did a little bit of expectation setting for the Gears 4 betastarting on April 18. It's not a polished, pre-release demo - it's an actual test:
"What you're gonna play on the 18th is gonna be basically an alpha build of our multiplayer. That means there's going to be issues and whatever, but it's an actual beta".
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