Valve’s Yahn Bernier has quelled some fears for PC gamers that Left 4 Dead on PC would be banishing splitscreen completely, he says that’s not the plan.
It was something they ”only wanted to officially support” on the Xbox 360. With that said though they will be offering it back in the full game as ”an “unsupported” bonus feature.”
A simple console command made it possible for splitscreen play on the PC but a patch for the demo removed the feature so not to interfere with any bug reports from gamers.
Here’s designer Bernier’s full post on the official Steam forums:
Splitscreen was always something we only wanted to officially support on the x360 due to the controller issues. However, we are planning on making some of the functionality work on the PC as an “unsupported” bonus feature. We turned it off for the demo because we didn’t want to have to deal with any additional bug reports etc. about it interfering with the demo experience, but the current plan is to re-enable it after we launch the full product.
There are a number of tuning variables, the but tricky thing will be the controller. When testing, the best setup on the PC is to have two joystick/x360 style USB controllers. I think it will also be possible to have one keyboard/mouse and one joystick player.
I haven’t looked into supporting two keyboards/mice, as I’m not even sure PC’s can deal with that and I doubt we’re talking about lots and lots of possible users for such a config.
Left 4 Dead is being released on Xbox 360 and PC this November 21st.
Source: Shacknews
