The New Xbox Ad Showed Halo 5 With Split-Screen, But It's Not Happening

The cheeky new advertisement for the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition showed a group of people playing Halo 5: Guardians multiplayer with split-screen. Some took this as a playful tease that the game might, finally, get updated to support split-screen–a feature the game controversially left out.

Unfortunately, it was merely an editing issue. Halo community director Brian Jarrard confirmed on Twitter that the depiction of split-screen for Halo 5 in the trailer was only “a little bit of good old fashioned creative liberty in the editing bay.”

Halo 5 launched without split-screen multiplayer, a staple of the franchise, and fans quickly let Microsoft know about this omission. Developer 343 has said time and again that it will never add split-screen to Halo 5, but thankfully Halo Infinite will have this feature.

Halo 5 executive producer Josh Holmes said the decision to remove split-screen from Halo 5 was “one of the most difficult ones we’ve ever had to make as a studio.” He added that Halo 5’s new “massive-scale environments,” better visuals, and improved AI might have been “compromised” if split-screen was in the mix. Not only that, but Phil Spencer says the majority of Halo co-op happens across Xbox Live, not locally.

The Xbox One S All-Digital Edition launches on May 7 for $250 USD. For lots more on the pros and cons of the digital-only system, check out the video embedded above.