Six player Halo split-screen has been achieved by a group of players in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, after 343 Industries cancelled local co-op in Halo Infinite earlier this month.
A recent Reddit post from ChickenMissile shows the six player split-screen play in action in the FPS game, as mods and an open source tool have been combined to pull off the impressive achievement on PC. The video even shows six people playing in the one room together, further cementing the legitimacy of the footage.
It should be noted that this isn’t Halo: The Master Chief Collection campaign footage, but instead what looks like a match of local multiplayer, as evidenced by the scoreboard showing on one of the six screen segments during the video.
In response to a comment on the Reddit thread, ChickenMissile said “It was actually quite easy. Nucleus coop does everything by itself, it recognises that I’ve got six controllers connected and it lets me split the screen six ways, then the mod does the rest.”
Halo MCC on PC in 6 way splitscreen using nucleus coop from halo
ChickenMissile also adds that “theoretically the mod can go up to 36 players”, but that their computer wouldn’t be able to handle it. This also meant that the group of split-screen players could only play Halo 3 or earlier due to how taxing it was on ChickenMissile’s PC as well.
A user also asked ChickenMissile why they didn’t just play with six laptops via a LAN setup, to which they responded: “Well firstly not everyone owns Halo, let alone has a laptop that can run it. I mean we could just play the older Halos in that case too. Other reason being we’re in a university residence so it’s a bit harder to set up LAN games through their network. And I guess the last reason is why not LMAO.”
Nucleus Co-op is a free and open source tool for Windows PCs that essentially adds split-screen co-op to games that don’t initially support it. The tool currently supports over 400 games on PC, and it even lets players split-screen between console controllers and mouse and keyboard set ups. The system is also quite simple, as an “advanced handler system” is used to help players just click play and launch their games automatically.
You can check out ChickenMissile’s Reddit thread and the Nucleus Co-op website as well if you fancy getting some local split-screen action on a large number of games.
If you want to fill yourself up with Halo news, why not check out our story about how an upcoming Halo Reborn mod aims to transform the original trilogy into one colossal game, or how the Halo Infinite roadmap is its “final nail in the coffin” says Cr1tikal instead.
