Helldivers 2 Is Making Me Mourn The Death Of Split-Screen Co-Op

Summary

FOMO drives me to try new games, but without split-screen co-op, I'm unable to play Helldivers 2 with my partner.
Lack of split-screen co-op is due to hardware constraints and profit-driven decisions, leading to a decline in couch co-op gaming.
The shared experience of couch co-op gaming with friends and family is irreplaceable and disappearing due to online trends.

I have FOMO, and I 💛got it bad. Not wanting to miss out on stuff has driven me to do a great many things in my life that probably didn’t benefit me, mostly related to partying, but it affects me in gaming, too. Whe🏅n I see everybody playing a cool game that looks fun and has been reviewed well, especially when my coworkers are into it, I want to see what all the fuss is about.

That’s what’s happening with Helldivers 2 right now. Curiosity has gotten the best of me, 💙and I’m now sorely tempted to shell out for the game and deliver sweet Democracy to bugs and automatons. The problem is that I don’t have friends. Well, that’s not true – I do, but most of them aren’t gamers. I’m the most likely person in the group to decline a hangout if it’s not at my house, beca🍌use I’ve already committed time to playing some sick new video game. The rest will play an occasional game of Dota or Overwatch 2, but they aren’t going to buy a new game just to play it with me.

The only person who was as curious about Helldivers 2 was, unfortunately, my partner, who lives with me. We have oඣne PS5 and one PC. Helldivers 2 does not have split-screen co-op, and I'm not buying the game on two different platforms just so we can play 🐼together. We are not going to be able to play together.

Multiplayer games are everywhere right now. There’s no shortage of games you can play over💎 the internet, but I’ve never liked to play like that. I was never particularly keen on hopping online to play with strangers – getting yelled at and called slurs by random people isn’t my idea of fun, and I’d always rather play with friends who won’t hate crime me. And, if I’m playing with friends, it’s almost always more appealing to play in the same room. When I was a teenager, after getting home from school, my brother and I would play Halo 4 together on the same screen. I’ve been craving that kind of gameplay from triple-A games ever since, but it’s hard to get that nowadays.

Where Did Couch Co-Op Go?

The slow death of split-screen co-op hasn’t been arbitrary. In a lot of cases, the hardware just can’t keep up. Graphics are getting better, gamers are demanding higher frame rates, and maps are getting bigger. It’s difficult for the hardware to support all of that without exploding, or at the very least, without performance suffering. Of cou🎉rse, split-screen also makes less money – it’s more profitable to force people who want to play together to buy two copies instead of one that they ca🏅n play on the couch together.

That’s a shame, because the death of couch co-op is also the death of a specific way of bonding through gaming. Playing in different houses with headsets is fine and fun, but the experience of sitting side by side and crying with laughter together as you get massacred by enemies can’t be replicated. Couch co-op with family members is how countless people got into gaming in the first place, and being able to pick up and play a game with my friends and loved ones has brought me closer to countless people. It makes me very sad to think tha🦄t one day, because of the pursuit of more money and better graphics, we might barely see any couch co-op games at all. This shared experience, like so many things, has gone almost entirely online, and it’s just not the same.