Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout loses split-screen support

About as quietly as it was added to the game, split-screen play in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s battle royale Blackout mode has been removed.

Players noticed the feature was no longer in the game this week following Black Ops 4’s most recent patch. A Treyarch representative, on Reddit, checked with the development team and was told that split-screen has been disabled “as we evaluate some known issues.”

Split-screen wasn’t a feature touted when the multiplayer-only game launched in October and appears to have been added to the game shortly after its Oct. 12 release. Note that this split-screen removal is only for the Blackout mode; it appears to be working just fine for those who want to take part in competitive multiplayer from their couch, supporting up to four players in the Zombies mode.

No word on when or even if this will return, or what the issues are. Split-screen play, once a mainstay feature and particularly for first-person shooter games, has become something of an afterthought as more and more people seem happy to play with friends online instead.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, by Infinity Ward, is coming Oct. 25 for Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Ordinarily, Treyarch’s next game in the series would be in 2021, but a report in May suggested that Treyarch is taking the lead on the 2020 game since the collaboration of Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software has not gone well.