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Comment by blakeyrat | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft never dropped local multiplayer. Just as many kids younger than you have those same nostalgic memories about going over to a friend's house and playing 4-player Halo 2 or Rock Band.

They might not "focus" on it (whatever that means-- it has the feature, it works, what more "focus" do you need?), I suppose.

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It's the focus that I'm talking about: LMP is an increasingly rare feature in games, save indies (which usually don't have online MP), and a few genres (Fighting Games, Rhythm Games). For example, AFAIK the new Halos don't have LMP. I know several other shooters have dropped it.

> They might not "focus" on it (whatever that means-- it has the feature, it works, what more "focus" do you need?), I suppose.

To me, it means many first party titles are designed around using it. For instance on Nintendo consoles: the main Mario series games, Mario Kart series, Smash Bros series, Mario Party series, Mario Sports series, Nintendo Land, Splatoon, etc, etc, are all designed with multiplayer in mind.

I guess the difference is, it's not just a couple of titles, or "it works", but instead it's a major company focus for their titles. That's a pretty big difference.

Indeed it is: Games like Halo heavily de-emphasize it, and games like Titanfall and Overwatch and such don't even have it anymore: Once upon a time, if an MP-only game didn't have Local Multiplayer on console, it would have been laughed out of the room.

One possible benefit of the hybrid handheld/docked model is that each player maintains their own system and screen, independent of whether or not they have control of the television or are even in the same room as their opponent.

I don't know how much Nintendo is going to implement with regards to their online services, but if they do this right, they would have the killer family gaming machine ecosystem.

They could: * Implement sensible parental controls. Each user potentially having their own handheld system would make this significantly easier and more robust. * Implement a friendly family content sharing model. I'm not necessarily begging for free family sharing a-la-Steam, but a discounted license per additional family user would be a smart move, compared to their current 3DS strategy. * Implement something along the lines of PS4's amazing SharePlay feature, where you can invite a friend to watch you play, voice chat, and even hand the controller virtually over to them so they can help you through tricky sections. Here again, the hybrid model would make it so cool to cheer on my kid from a hotel room across the country on a business trip.

I don't know if the NS will live up to its teaser video, but everything I've seen makes me excited to imagine possibilities, rather than the raw polygon-pushing and logic-crunching. This in stark contrast to the comparatively gimmicky Wii and Wii U.

It's implied that the Switch will have the standard multiple controller setup when you plug it into the TV.

Some of that stuff might get implemented, but no, each player needn't necessarily have their own console.

FWIW, games like Black Ops 3 technically have LMP, but it's a subpar experience compared to prior generations (particularly limiting in features/settings, like being able to choose basic things like vertical/horizontal screen splitting). Often, the feature's riddled with bugs and other glaring flaws that make it a notably worse experience than forming online parties on two consoles, on two TVs, even when you're sitting next to each other on the same couch.

Halo 5 drops local multiplayer altogether

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