Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero will indeed have a split-screen multiplayer option so that people can play against each other locally. Bandai Namco confirmed as much this week in a new video after people wondered about that very question ahead of some product descriptions that seemed to suggest we would be seeing split-screen fights in Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, but as players may have anticipated, there’s a catch. The split-screen multiplayer option will have some limitations that will prevent it from fully mirroring the online or singleplayer experience players will find elsewhere in the game, but it at least seems like it’s functional enough that players will get what they’re looking for out of it.
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Jun Furutani, the producer working on Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero who’s periodically shared updates about the game in the past, returned this week in the video from Bandai Namco that discussed the Dragon Ball game’s modes beyond the traditional online experience. Split-screen multiplayer was shown off towards the end of the video, and based on Furutani’s explanation, it sounds like there originally weren’t even plans to have this mode in place.
“Our focus for this game was seeing how far we could get players to really become Dragon Ball series characters,” he said in the video. “We wanted to show effects like the wind blasting around and the weather changing just by charging your Ki, and rocks and buildings being dynamically destroyed by the force of battle, and take advantage of the power of the latest generation of consoles. With that in mind, it was difficult to implement local split-screen multiplayer while retaining those core elements, so we developed this game with online multiplayer and an offline single-player mode in mind.”
But split-screen is a big part of these sorts of fighting games, so Furutani said the developers worked to make it happen albeit with some compromises.
“However, we have always wanted for as many people as possible to enjoy the game in various situations,” he continued. “After careful consideration, we have decided to implement the split-screen multiplayer mode exclusively within the ‘Hyperbolic Time Chamber’ stage. As character selection was originally designed with single-player gameplay in mind, there will unfortunately be a slight inconvenience during character selection before a split-screen battle. Two players cannot simultaneously select characters, and only one player may choose a character at a time. However, we hope this mode will allow players to enjoy local matches with friends and family.”
So, basically, you can’t pick a character at the same time as your friends, and you can only play local split-screen on the Hyperbolic Time Chamber stage so that there’s less business in the background to weigh down the game. Those are pretty small concessions to make since they don’t technically impact that playable characters at all, so not a bad deal for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero players.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is scheduled to release later this year on October 11th.
