With triple-A games developers having more or less ditched split-screen features altogether in recent years thanks to online functionality, the act of same-screen play has become a rarity ever since, but not due to a lack of interest on the consumer side.
Besides the arrival of the annual Call of Duty, gamers looking for a great couch co-op experience have largely been left out in the cold, forced instead to broaden their horizons to include more independently-made titles.
For Honor was set to go against that trend by including split-screen play, but now it appears that won’t be the case after all. Speaking to IGN in a video interview, For Honor producer Stephane Cardin told the site that the development team decided to cut the feature in order to focus on making sure all the third-person hack and slash’s existing features were polished to a “AAA level.”
It was a feature that we loved, but, when we looked at what needs to be done to support online co-op, for us it was critical to make a decision now so we can polish all the features at the AAA level and make sure that we have the most amazing experience.
The news comes as a surprise, especially as For Honor creative director Jason Vandenberghe had told GameSpot in a previous interview that split-screen was “super-required, because this is a game about fighting with weapons, split-screen [is] absolutely a key feature for us.”
It was previously unclear as to whether Cardin was speaking only about the online portion of the brawler, but Polygon has confirmed that the feature has been dropped from the title entirely.
For Honor launches February 14, 2017 on Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. We went hands-on with game at this year’s E3 as well as in the closed beta held a few weeks back and thoroughly enjoyed our time with it.
