It’s not just to try to sell more X-Box One! PopCap Producer Brian Lindley lets us know why Popcap had to make that decision for releasing the game.
The Xbox One gives us the horsepower to do proper split-screen mode, whereas on Xbox 360 it wouldn’t have been possible without severely compromising frame rate and quality and stuff like that.
It’s one of those things where with next-generation hardware we’re like, ‘yeah we can do split-screen and we can hold the frame rate and make it look really good.’ That’s the primary reason that it exists on Xbox One only.
A couple generations ago, most games had some sort of local multiplayer support and I think with this last generation or two, online multiplayer really came to the fore as part of console gaming. I think that took a lot of the focus away from local multiplayer.
To me, it feels like it’s swinging back the other direction, not that online multiplayer is less important, but trying to figure out how you have that couch play experience, and if you can support it with your game, it definitely adds huge value for players when they’re deciding on which games they want to buy. Speaking for myself, I think in the younger days online multiplayer is what I want to do the most, but now that I’m older and you have kids and you’re trying to figure out ways to get other friends and children involved, then it comes back to local multiplayer. I would love to see more split-screen and local multiplayer experiences come to life.
Source: Examiner.
