I am also a big fan of 343i. They are one of the best storytellers and graphics designers in the industry today. But their reasoning behind skipping split screen is bullshit. They could have reduced to 30fps and downgraded the resolution to enable it. Experiencing split screen has never been about the graphics but the story and doing this together.

For some reason, people don't seem to understand that. I don't care about graphics when I'm playing with others. It's about playing with others.

I probably wouldn't call myself a Halo "fan," but I will say that I've thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game with a splitscreen friend in the past, and Halo 5 removing the feature for what feels like very arbitrary reasons (you can totally just lower the framerate for splitscreen; Mario Kart does that and it's totally fine) does annoy me. Halo's gameplay and story have never really been enough to engage me, and I find myself only really getting into things when I've got someone by me to talk/make jokes/team up with or just shoot in the back when they're not looking.

I don't think Halo 5 automatically becomes a bad game without it, but it does remove any incentive I had to get the game somewhere down the road. Without a friend, Halo's campaigns are ones I find generally pretty boring to play, so yeah.

Well, I won't be able to play with my wife now...so there's THAT :(

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You don't really say that in the OP though. You just talk about it not being as big of a deal as people are saying it is and that the people that are really upset about it aren't Halo fans. I think this thread has done a pretty good job of showing that yes, real Halo fans are upset at the loss of split-screen, and it's more than just "oh well..." for a lot of them.

I'm sure that's true of some, but there will be some who mean that, and others that are saying it now and will still end up getting an Xbox One and maybe even Halo 5. It's the internet, people overreact to pretty much everything.

I think it is a really big deal missing out on split screen. One of my buddies and I play the campaign the first time by ourselves, but then we get together and play split screen at harder levels and try different things. It's definitely a drawback not being able to do it.

Plus we have other friends join us online sometimes.

It's not the end of the world, but it's a big loss for community players.