a lot of couples or siblings or whatever who would like to play the game together larians engine programmers were less than thrilled by the idea they said wed have to render this thing twice its going to be an extreme burden and then forget about consoles thats never going to happen as lead game designer at the time namdar himself had reservations about the idea for one thing adding local multiplayer to a console game involves meeting an additional set of technical certification requirements if youre doing online multiplayer theres already about 6070 tcrs that you need to comply with but then if youre doing local coop theres also a whole bunch so in production terms just meeting the platform requirements for these things like what happens if player two pulls their joypad out in keeping with its general kitchensink approach to game development larian did manage to bash together a splitscreen mode nonetheless but the feature was too raw to ship with the initial release it was added with the enhanced editions the following year even then it took a minor breakthrough from the engine side to bring the feature to fruition we were going to render the scene twice but somebody came up with an idea that meant we could just share the resources between camerasimage credit larianif divinity original sins splitscreen features were an exhausting gamble the payoff is a fascinating twist on the already chaotic business of divinity multiplayer not just a throwback to the days of snes or n64 coop but proof that there are still types of splitscreen experience waiting to be invented take the implications when playing as characters with conflicting narrative arcs those were your personal quests that you had to complete which were a secret from the other party members right namdar notes so if youre playing on your pc you can say yeah im going off into the wilderness ill be right back which was already fishy but if youre playing splitscreen it really requires some very inventive fooling of your teammate to go out on some kind of secret mission or just have a dialogue while theyre not paying attention its extremely fun the same goes for the quintessentially larian prank of sneaking objects into your partners inventory to get them into trouble but there are also benefits for players who shock want to help each other just pointing out things just by being next to each other or opening up a book and reading it together on one persons screen or im at the shop what do you need and then you can just look at their inventory while youre stuck in a fight possibilities that demonstrate how splitscreen has been neglected namdar concludes theres huge potential to do really fun stuff for further evidence of that potential see samurai punks screencheat which as its name suggests makes a virtue of the old splitscreen gambit of spying on your opponents