Had a rare moment of downtime this weekend so some friends and I decided to get together for a night of BBQ, beers, football, and, of course, Halo. Given that we are all horribly in debt medical students, the 4 of us were playing split screen on a single console.
We hop into matchmaking, get a game after about 10 minutes of waiting, and the match loads up.
The framerate immediately drops into the 10-15 FPS range and stays there for the entire match. And when I say the entire match, I mean literally from start to finish, the game was a slideshow. There were moments where the framerate dropped low enough for me to actually count individual frames. It honestly reminded me of playing Goldeneye on the N64: a blurry, stuttery mess. Needless to say it was impossible to aim and we got completely steamrollered. We later tried to play online with only 2 of us on the TV at a time, and the framerate was still utterly abysmal.
We decide to give offline local play a try instead, so we set up a 2v2 custom game on a smaller map. Even then, the framerate would frequently dip into unplayable territory, usually whenever the 4 of us were involved in a battle at once, or when 2 of us would be passing through the center of the map.
Why was the game shipped in this state? Split screen multiplayer is a core component of Halo and has been since the original game, and yet it is borderline nonfunctional in Halo 4. Why is this considered acceptable quality for what is undoubtedly considered a flagship AAA release, developed by a Microsoft-funded first party developer? Looking at all of the glowing reviews and near universal journalistic praise the game has received, I was more than a little surprised to see the split screen gameplay being essentially broken. It really shows a blatant lack of optimization and effort on the developer's part, given that past Halo releases did not have such severe performance issues for such a basic area of the game.
TLDR; Halo 4 split screen performance is unacceptable in both on- and offline play.
We hop into matchmaking, get a game after about 10 minutes of waiting, and the match loads up.
The framerate immediately drops into the 10-15 FPS range and stays there for the entire match. And when I say the entire match, I mean literally from start to finish, the game was a slideshow. There were moments where the framerate dropped low enough for me to actually count individual frames. It honestly reminded me of playing Goldeneye on the N64: a blurry, stuttery mess. Needless to say it was impossible to aim and we got completely steamrollered. We later tried to play online with only 2 of us on the TV at a time, and the framerate was still utterly abysmal.
We decide to give offline local play a try instead, so we set up a 2v2 custom game on a smaller map. Even then, the framerate would frequently dip into unplayable territory, usually whenever the 4 of us were involved in a battle at once, or when 2 of us would be passing through the center of the map.
Why was the game shipped in this state? Split screen multiplayer is a core component of Halo and has been since the original game, and yet it is borderline nonfunctional in Halo 4. Why is this considered acceptable quality for what is undoubtedly considered a flagship AAA release, developed by a Microsoft-funded first party developer? Looking at all of the glowing reviews and near universal journalistic praise the game has received, I was more than a little surprised to see the split screen gameplay being essentially broken. It really shows a blatant lack of optimization and effort on the developer's part, given that past Halo releases did not have such severe performance issues for such a basic area of the game.
TLDR; Halo 4 split screen performance is unacceptable in both on- and offline play.
