Digital Foundry Says Halo Infinite Split-Screen Is 'Excellent', 343 Declines To Comment

Let’s not have that be a part of the game though because that’s fun and we don’t want people to play games for that reason.

I imagine they got so far and left it to focus on the GAAS aspect…as that’s what will bring in the more money than giving us an option for the main campaign that should have been there at launch. Hopefully they’ll go back to it as it sounds like it really doesn’t need that much more work doing.

Shame they went GAAS with this game... Now, I've heard of failing games going F2P. But, this could be a real case for the opposite. Here's hoping Forge can save it. If they really open up the ability for the community to create and share, it could be big. If you can't support your game with content, let the fans create it.

Normally I'd comment that the management at 343i should all be sacked, but since they essentially all have been lately I'm hoping that whoever is now in charge has the decency to release the Split-Screen co-op properly.

If I was an employee at 343 and all that worked got cancelled by upper management, I would be pissed.

Here’s hoping another u-turn occurs at some point.

Supposedly, David Berger, the lead of HI's engine, quit (or was quitted) after the split screen co-op cancellation, but not many news outlets are talking about it. Maybe the upper management wanted the feature cancelled, and he quit out of spite

I completed the campaign, thought it was good, then went on to multiplayer.

After 5 minutes switched it off and uninstalled.

Multiplayer was a mess of over-engineered menus, options, and a trillion different ways to customise stuff.

There comes a point where more is never good.

Scale back the number of game modes, tone down the options, get rid of a billion different ways to customise your character.

Then i might be interested.

There’s been so many negative decisions with the game since release but now there’s a team/studio restructure underway, hopefully things will be changing for the better for the future of Halo.

Now that I’m done with the campaign, Halo Infinite can get in the bin and I’ll just download The Master Chief Collection again if I ever fancy playing Halo.

I'm convinced Microsoft is slowly trying to kill gaming altogether.

The AAA gaming industries’ obsession with live service is gross.

How strange. It sounds like it's fine even on Xbox one all things considered. Plus they already put in all this work anyway, why scrap it? One answer I've seen is so they can focus on live service elements but again if that was the plan why not cancel long ago instead of pouring resources into it up to this point? If it was super buggy and whatnot that would makes sense but it works fine.

Something fishy is going on here!

One day, a kid in his basement will make a Halo-like with 4-player split screen, and no GAAS BS and 343i will lose the players it has left.

Follow the $$$. Local splitscreen multiplayer and co-op is the very antithesis of current online business models. Any time that players are offline, that's time their experience can't be gated, controlled, or exploited for additional $$$ after the initial point-of-sale, PERIOD. It's also seen as a wasted opportunity to force each player to purchase their own hardware, copy of the software, and any DLC involved; if you think this is an exaggeration then I humbly point you to the fact that local multiplayer on the same system/television currently requires each player to sign in with a separate XBox account, which is a headache that absolutely screams it was deliberate on 343's part. 343 and Microsoft simply decided to go all-in with their F2P business model as Halo's "future". They're hoping users will simply give up and forget about all the stuff that's not a priority for THEM.

Even Combat Evolved let players have more freedom and put more genuine effort into the game than Infinite, on every single level; even its campaign had varied weather, something 343 couldn't be bothered to accomplish two decades and three hardware generations later. Ditto local splitscreen; give me Combat Evolved and Halo 2's splitscreen where I can effortlessly enjoy matches with friends on the same TV over what we have now. None of the mess surrounding Halo Infinite is due to technical limitations; it's due to the deliberate choices of 343 and Microsoft and their intent to strong-arm users into accepting...and continuing to fork out $$$ for...a direction none of us ever asked for or wanted.

@Richnj splitgate is much better (imo) & that was made by a small team on a small budget

@AtlanteanMan I agree with all the reasons you mentioned. Still since the ex-CEO had promised it so strongly it should have been there.

However, as DF video also showed it, the 2-player co-op on Xbox One VCR essentially runs, yes. But looks terrible graphically. It would take them ages to sort it out. Their engine is probably very weak and they haven't really shown themselves to be geniuses in graphics. I think they know fixing X1 versions of co-op is beyond their own skillset and they don't want to run towards freelancers or The Coalition or something for it. So let's cancel it.

540p with basically all the Visual quality settings turned down to their lowest creating an 'Ugly' visual with low res 'place holder' polygon blobs as 'enemies' at any reasonable distance from the camera and despite turning ALL the visual settings and resolution down to Standard Def levels, it still cannot hit 30fps often in Split screen on an XB1 VCR.

Yes the XB1S has a 'tiny' bit more GPU (1.32TF to 1.4TF is not a big jump) and the XB1X, whilst it may have over 4x the GPU power, only boosts the CPU by a small amount too - 1.75Ghz to 2.1Ghz from a 'cheap tablet' CPU.

The Series S/X has a much more capable CPU running twice as fast as the XB1S CPU and has Multi-threading capability too. For a game that is 'heavy' on CPU (look at the PC version), I bet that is the 'bottleneck' on XB1 hardware. If they can't bring a 'decent' version to XB1 hardware, should they release that feature on Series hardware?

What surprises me is the people that think the XB1 version is 'good enough' to release. If they released 'Halo' on XB1 today at 540p with that visual presentation and terrible frame rate, there would be a Massive outrage and calls for MS to sack everyone at 343. Now because its so bad, but just about 'playable' (worse than many Alpha/Beta builds...) People think they should release...

Honestly, if they hadn't cancelled and released this feature, people would be really angry and extremely critical. It wouldn't be 'good enough' for a 'Major 1st Party AAA game developer' and should of been 'cancelled' (like Cyberpunk 2077 on XB1 hardware). They can't win here regardless.

At the extremely low visual settings, its likely its hitting CPU bottlenecks and why it will never improve the performance. To try and get a consistent 30fps, they can't exactly turn down aspects further to free up enough resources to boost the frame rate - in other words, if it looked better, it'd play worse, if it played better, it would look worse (if possible)...

Its not like you can never play 'co-op', just have to play online instead...

Oh, and to get ahead of all the BS.

The single screen version of Halo Infinite on Xbone also runs at 540p and sub 30fps. So the notions that it's not good enough for those users, or that it's a target that 343i isn't happy with, is nonsense.

It's already the reality on Xbone so trying to give the impression that these are exclusive to split screen and is unacceptable, is disingenuous.

@Richnj And that's where you are WRONG again - the Single-player Xbox ONE version targets 1080/30 and uses DRS to drop it down to 720p (with TAA reconstruction)

The Split screen mode is 540p (with TAA reconstruction but with so few 'pixels to reconstruct, as well as as all the visual settings that are turned down, it still can't run as 'smoothly' as the Single Player with a much worse visual experience to boot. At least you can see what enemies are around - not have to get close enough for a 'better' asset to pop in to give you that visual clarification...

This can be found by watching DF's video analysis of BOTH the Single-player and the 'cancelled' Split screen mode. As they sum up, the XB1 has an acceptable 720-1080p image quality that does suffer from minor pop-in and softness, but the 30fps doesn't feel great with stutter and hitches but still returns an average of 30fps the majority of the time. The Splitscreen drops res down to 540p has even lower visual settings and fewer pixels to reconstruct up to 540p, more aggressive LoDs leading to much more pop-in (not counting Glitches, bugs and other issues) and the frame rate barely touches the 30fps line. Its much worse than the 'poor frame pacing' 30fps you get in SP or 30fps modes on Series consoles. Its a 'big' downgrade by having to try and run 'two' versions of the game simultaneously from two different players perspectives...

BOTH use TAA reconstruction to target whatever resolution the 'final' image is delivering - in Single-Player - that is 1080p with DRS dropping down to 720p in high intensity moments. In Split screen, that is 540p with the Frame Rate unable to even hold 30fps but still relying on TAA reconstruction, all visual settings reduced to lowest settings and still can't deliver an acceptable visual quality at a 'reasonably consistent' 30fps!!

@BAMozzy I'm sorry, you are right and I was wrong. It was just the unfinished single player build that was 540p and sub 30fps.

So comparing this unfinished split screen build to the finished single screen build and not the unfinished build is totally fair, I'm sure.

Of course its not the same! They have already optimised everything they could of done for the Single Player experience to get the 'best' visual quality they could achieve at 30fps - the Lowest acceptable frame rate. That's why they are using Temporal methods to increase the 'final' resolution output to 1080p and rely on DRS to drop resolution to free up resources to stabilise frame rates.

That becomes the 'starting' point for them to attempt to add Split Screen. They are still using TAA - which they weren't on the 'early' builds of the Single Player. So whilst it may of dropped to 540p (native) and still does in high intensity situations, the temporal upscaling never lets the outputted reconstructed image drop below 720p. Now the max output resolution is 540p with Reconstruction (so running 'lower' than 540p natively) and with so few 'pixels' to reconstruct up to 540p, the image quality is extremely poor quality. The trees are so blocky even compared to 720p in Single Player (because they had 'more' pixels, more information to 'reconstruct' a better looking tree).

This is after they have patched and worked on the 'released' single Player, already optimised and streamlined 'everything' they could do to get the level of performance at that visual quality we see today. That was the 'starting' build for Split Screen and after reducing the 'output' resolution, not the resolution the game is running at (which could be as low as 50% on each axis that the 'best' TAA solutions offer) and turning all the visual settings down lower too. Things like draw distance, shadow quality etc - all of which reduces the 'load' on the GPU and despite dropping down to a quarter of the resolution of SP, it doesn't free up enough resources to run the game smoothly.

That's not surprising as certain things are not impacted by dropping resolution - things like Hit detection, Enemy AI, Enemy count, tracking fire and damage, controller processing, object calling etc - in fact some of these are actually 'doubled' by adding a 2nd player as you have their perspective to display and run too...

So yes an 'OLD' build of a Single Player game doesn't relate to a much newer build of the game that was the 'starting' point for this feature and 'proves' that the Split Screen is too much for the XB1 hardware. That first unfinished build was before they added temporal reconstruction which was in the Split Screen build. You 'start' with that build that's already working and 'complete', all the enemies, the layout etc all set in stone etc so that you keep the latest optimisations, engine tweaks etc rather than roll back to an earlier build and roll back various 'updates/tweaks'...

You maybe willing to accept that level of visual presentation and 'poor' frame rates - its not the 'worst' Split Screen performance in a Halo game - but by Modern standards, that is 'unacceptable' and I can totally understand why 343 wouldn't want to 'officially' release a product/feature etc in that state.

You also have to remember that this game has been out nearly a year now and that the team would be very familiar with the Game, the resources it requires and what they can squeeze out of the XB1 hardware. If it was running at say 720p with a consistent 30fps, maybe only dropping to 540p in the most intense situations, with those bugs/glitches, I would probably say it was a 'mistake' to cancel and those bugs/glitches could probably be fixed with time.

@AtlanteanMan To my knowledge starting with Halo4 on xbox360, local split-screen mp with or without LAN required individual accounts. Guest sign-ins did not work. I don't recall if this was the case with prior Halo's but MCC has always required accounts. It's easy to create dummy accounts but is annoying.