Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition recently made the switch from Games for Windows Live to Steam and it seems that it lost some of its code in the move. Specifically the code that allowed the game to be played in splitscreen co-op and the code that would allow modders to add the mode themselves.
The release notes for the title found their way to Pastebin where it was discovered splitscreen support. had been “ripped out.” Disgruntled users took to NeoGAF to express their displeasure where Capcom representative wbacon attempted to explain the removal of the features.
“The split screen code that was ripped out from the PC build is from the console version. As some of you may know, MT Framework is our multiplatform development tool/engine that is utilized across several platforms. The aforementioned split-screen code is an orphaned code base from the PS3/Xbox 360 SKU which simply does not work on a PC.
“The crux of the issue is that the PC code base has no concept of multiple controllers. In other words, if you plugged in two Xbox controllers, RE5 has no way of figuring out which gamepad controls which character — or what happens if one player uses a KB+M versus a gamepad. It’s a difficult problem to solve since the original game’s logic wasn’t designed with multiple controller devices in mind,” they said.
wbacon’s claims were refuted by two modders who claimed they’d worked on enabling splitscreen in the first place. “I don’t understand why you claim the code ‘simply does not work on a PC’. As I was one of the key people who worked on the split-screen mod that enabled it on the GFWL initial release version for PCs,” said the first modder. They were backed up by the second who said, “I was able to get splitscreen coop working fairly well except for a major problem with the game thinking player two is supposed to have their own savegame.”
Capcom eventually made a statement to Eurogamer claiming that some of the code had to be removed when porting the title. “As the original Resident Evil 5 release on GFWL didn’t officially include local co-op, the mode is therefore not supported by the recent Steam release. Some game code from the original GFWL release did have to be changed in the porting process so both Resident Evil 5 and the new Untold Stories Bundle add-on content worked seamlessly together.”
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