Last week during a preview event, developer The Coalition revealed that Gears of War 4 for the PC will provide local split-screen co-op. According to technical director Mike Rayner, this is difficult to support given the game must utilize multiple inputs, the placement of the user interface, and the camera’s focus on each player. Ultimately, adding split-screen support was a “labor of love” for the studio.
Of course, gamers see split-screen support on plenty of console games. However, PCs aren’t locked to a specific hardware set like consoles. Thus, PC gamers can adjust the screen resolution and aspect ratio to meet their liking if they are supported by the hardware. That is a lot of variation to factor in and then throw multiple viewpoints on top of that. As Rayner pointed out, split-screen on the PC has to be right, not tacked on like a secondary feature.
“Gears of War 4 looked noticeably worse when I briefly switched over to playing it on an Xbox One for part of my demo,” PC Gamer’s Tom Marks wrote. “Aliasing on corners of objects and hair was distracting and the framerate looked sluggish by comparison. The PC is shaping up to be the best version of the game, despite Gears of War 4 still being locked to Windows 10 and its UWP.”
To be fair, Marks was playing Gears of War 4 on a PC packed with an Intel Core i7-6950X processor, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card with 8GB of video memory, and 64GB of system memory. The game was running at a hefty 3,440 x 1,440 resolution with its graphics settings maxed out along with an increased field of view. The game even ran at an average of 84 frames per second at 75Hz with these settings. The Xbox One console certainly cannot compete with that. […]