Talking Point: Is Local Co-Op On Xbox Still Important To You In 2024?

It’s becoming less prominent

by Ben Kerry Yesterday, 7pm

These days, online multiplayer is a massive part of gaming. The ever-growing live service sector has fuelled that notion even more so in recent years, with lots of modern games featuring some sort of online gameplay – even if ‘campaign’ is the focus. As a result, local multiplayer is a bit of a dying thing in the industry, but does that bother you? Is it still an important feature for you in 2024?

Take this as an example. This week, we’ve seen a huge deep dive on Call of Duty Zombies for the upcoming Black Ops 6 game, and the mode’s local co-op options are much more limited than they used to be. At one stage, four-player local co-op was a staple COD Zombies feature, but with Black Ops 6, it’s only playable with two players locally – and the feature is completely absent altogether on Xbox One and PS4!

That last-gen absence with BO6 is due to graphics and performance, which is another key issue when it comes to local co-op these days. Lots of games are using high-end visuals as an excuse to skip out on local co-op features, which is a real shame for people who still love playing multiplayer on the same screen at home.

Of course, things tend to work a bit better when the game is made for one-screen co-op to begin with, but even then, we get issues like Baldur’s Gate 3’s whole Xbox Series S saga. It’s nice that the Series X version got proper local co-op and that Larian Studios wanted to include the feature, but clearly, the way modern games are built is making local play harder and harder to achieve.

So, where do you stand on this topic in 2024? Is local co-op still an important Xbox feature for you? Get down in the comments and tell us what you think!

Ben is a News Writer at Pure Xbox, and is a fan of action, racing and straight-up shootin’ in any Xbox game he can get his hands on. When he’s not clutching an Xbox controller like his life depends on it, Ben spends his time listening to music that’s far too old for him, watching football on the telly and probably eating somewhere.

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