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Capcom 6 years delayed update on RE5 removes fully functioning local coop, and lies?

me0wish

Member
RE5 was recently updated, it stripped GFWL in favor of Steam, and finally after 6 years of waiting we get the Untold stories DLC (also known as RE5:Gold). However GFWL wasn't the only thing that was stripped, the GFWL version had a fully functioning coop mode that was easily enabled by modders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWyUyOO3uzw

It was so easy to enable, that many of us hoped that Capcom will officially add it to the game, but nope, they actually made an extra effort to remove it completely and even potentially lied about it.

Here is what Capcom had to say:

To clarify though, 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.

Here is what a modder had to say:
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. I can confirm that all the code is FULLY functional and it worked flawlessly for the GFWL version. We did not add anything extra to the game at all, it was simply enabled. The only problem was that the keyboard would control both characters so it was forcibly disabled. The game has no problem at all distinguishing between two controllers. Evidently the game knows to assign PAD1 to Player1, PAD2 to Player2 vise versa. Otherwise no characters would have moved at all.

So yeah, after how angry people were with Revelations 2 no coop, you thought Capcom would learn, but nope, they never learn, they release the DLC 6 years later, with day 1 pricing, stripped down content and then say the coop code doesn't work when it worked perfectly, they won't even leave it untouched so modders can add it back in.

Update 1:
Steam thread up:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/21690/discussions/0/618457398975777587/

Let our voices be heard guys!

Update 2:
Sectus successfully adds coop to the game with some major issues.
Unfortunately, I'm not getting good progress. I can get local splitscreen working with proper splitscreen view and working controls, but I hit 3 obstacles:
- I can't get the view to properly switch between splitscreen and cutscene view whenever it should. I have a few ideas on how to fix this at least.
- After quitting to the main menu, most or all of the inventory will most likely be reset.
- After playing for many hours, player two would simply fail to spawn after going to main menu once.

This is just sad:
Not sure if this is mentioned yet, but if you look at where the game is installed you'll notice Capcom made a funny oversight. There's a development change log of the port in the file called ReleaseNotes.txt

It's fun to read through, but also a bit sad when you see stuff like "Ripped out the Split Screen code."

Why on earth would you "Rip out" split screen code?? Sectus added coop in a couple of hours with out the "difficult problem to solve", why do you lie to us Capcom?
 
That's complete horseshit. I was looking forward to making a friend playthrough the whole game with me and I can only play it on PC right now! This is malarkey.
 
I'm sure the type of people that mod their games know where to acquire an old executable.

This. Also, I think a lot of people forget that a feature that partially works or isn't technically supported might be okay for modders to enable because it's "just a mod," but if Capcom can't get split screen working properly for whatever reason then it's not really acceptable for them. It was never officially included in the game or advertised as a feature, was it? If it was that's a different story, but if someone dug out some old code to enable it and the switch to Steamworks removed that code then that's just sort of what happens I guess. I'll take Steamworks over GFWL any day, co-op or no.
 

me0wish

Member
This. Also, I think a lot of people forget that a feature that partially works or isn't technically supported might be okay for modders to enable because it's "just a mod," but if Capcom can't get split screen working properly for whatever reason then it's not really acceptable for them.

The thing is, its fully functioning with no issues, a lot of us tested it and it was working perfectly from beginning till the end, why not just leave it for modders to fiddle with if they don't want to officially support it? It just doesn't make any sense.
 

me0wish

Member

The game's coop worked perfectly before Capcom updated it, as someone who didn't buy a physical copy of games for years, I find this really disturbing.

I'd rather have local coop working, rather than having an over priced DLC.
 
This. Also, I think a lot of people forget that a feature that partially works or isn't technically supported might be okay for modders to enable because it's "just a mod," but if Capcom can't get split screen working properly for whatever reason then it's not really acceptable for them. It was never officially included in the game or advertised as a feature, was it? If it was that's a different story, but if someone dug out some old code to enable it and the switch to Steamworks removed that code then that's just sort of what happens I guess. I'll take Steamworks over GFWL any day, co-op or no.

So why remove the coop code entirely though? If it's invisible to the average uncaring user but accessible by those who want it and who through the process are aware of the unfinished state of said function, why change it? The only conceivably reasonable explanation is that maybe they didn't want to deal with CS for idiots who managed to bork their games with the mod, but even then it's as simple as saying they don't provide support for unofficial mods and send them on their merry way. it wouldn't surprise me if it came out that there was some kind of console exclusivity clause somewhere because this and RER2 are too close and too weird for this to be coincidence.
 

Sir TapTap

Member
This is bullshit. Local co op is some of the best fun this game has to offer and is clearly the way it's meant to be played.

I hate this self-perpetuating cycle of devs not caring about local co op on PC then saying it's not worth supporting because there's no demand. PC local co op is great.
 
So why remove the coop code entirely though? If it's invisible to the average uncaring user but accessible by those who want it and who through the process are aware of the unfinished state of said function, why change it? The only conceivably reasonable explanation is that maybe they didn't want to deal with CS for idiots who managed to bork their games with the mod, but even then it's as simple as saying they don't provide support for unofficial mods and send them on their merry way. it wouldn't surprise me if it came out that there was some kind of console exclusivity clause somewhere because this and RER2 are too close and too weird for this to be coincidence.

Or it was lost in the porting process and they didn't want a bunch of unnecessary code kicking around.
 

dab0ne

Member
Seems silly for capcom to even mess with a feature on a 6 year old game. Why even bother and risk upsetting the hardcore fans of the game?
 

Hellraider

Member
Seems silly for capcom to even mess with a feature on a 6 year old game. Why even bother and risk upsetting the hardcore fans of the game?

Because those guys calling the shots have no idea how the industry, fanbases and PR works.
That's what happens when rich,clueless and trapped in their own bubble guys in suits are managing a company.
 

pizzacat

Banned
The game's coop worked perfectly before Capcom updated it, as someone who didn't buy a physical copy of games for years, I find this really disturbing.

I'd rather have local coop working, rather than having an over priced DLC.
Lets get the local coop working on a game I stopped playing years ago!
 

corn_fest

Member
Because those guys calling the shots have no idea how the industry, fanbases and PR works.
That's what happens when rich,clueless and trapped in their own bubble guys in suits are managing a company.

I highly doubt anyone in an executive position made this decision. More likely, leaving in the co-op code caused some issues during the Steamworks conversion, or it got stripped out before publishing because it's common practice to remove dead code from your final executable (and it was probably only left in the first time by accident).
 

mclem

Member
This. Also, I think a lot of people forget that a feature that partially works or isn't technically supported might be okay for modders to enable because it's "just a mod," but if Capcom can't get split screen working properly for whatever reason then it's not really acceptable for them. It was never officially included in the game or advertised as a feature, was it? If it was that's a different story, but if someone dug out some old code to enable it and the switch to Steamworks removed that code then that's just sort of what happens I guess. I'll take Steamworks over GFWL any day, co-op or no.

While that's true, that's not really much reason to strip it out, either. My suspicion is that the sequence of occurrences is along these lines:

PC game is developed with a prototype co-op version. It never gets formally completed to a satisfactory level of functionality
PC game is released. Vestiges of co-op remain.
Untold Stories is developed for all platforms. Someone realises that co-op code that's no longer necessary is still around, strips it out. Released game still contains vestiges; dev builds do not. PC release of Untold Stories is put on hold.
Co-op in released game is discovered and modded in.
GFWL is shut down. Devs have to return to the codebase to port things over to Steamworks.
Steamworks patch is released based on the development version without co-op hooks.
 

Dicer

Banned
Seems silly for capcom to even mess with a feature on a 6 year old game. Why even bother and risk upsetting the hardcore fans of the game?

Because CAPCPOM


Company has been clueless for fucking ages, they are a slowly dying dinosaur.
 

Hellraider

Member
I highly doubt anyone in an executive position made this decision. More likely, leaving in the co-op code caused some issues during the Steamworks conversion, or it got stripped out before publishing because it's common practice to remove dead code from your final executable (and it was probably only left in the first time by accident).

Of course. Some higher up didn't appear asking some programmers to remove shit. The root of the problem is how these executives don't understand what implications doing things like these have.

Negligence is the root of the problem. You now have (I'm also including their laughable Gold Edition price) bad word of mouth and are also making angry a small but loud fanbase where for minimum effort,time and money you could have reversed all of these into a "Praised based Capcom" climate.

It's not that this particular occassion will doom Capcom. It's the fact that dozens of these examples have been accumulating for years which has turned the Capcom brand name into a "villain" of the industry. They don't understand this because it won't show up on their fiscal year reports. Or to be precise, it does show up, they just don't notice.
 

petran79

Banned
what is also confusing is that RE5 runs on Windows XP, yet the DLC requires Windows 7! On the forum some confirm DLC works on XP, others refute it. But dont they use the same MT framework?

Have yet to see a game with similar requirements!
 

BennyBlanco

aka IMurRIVAL69
DxtU8YP.jpg
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
Fwiw, Sectus is working on implementing Co-op and has it going reasonably so far. But there are still some pretty serious bugs, and it's crap that he has to figure this all out through assembly disection rather than the developers themselves doing it with the original source code.
 
Wbacon has an account here too, I hope he'll respond in some form. He's usually great at replying to the community, even if it isn't the best of news.
 

laxu

Member
This can easily happen on any platform with physical releases, through the use of patches. PC platforms make it easier to reverse these things.

It's not so simple nowadays. Most game patches come via services like Steam or uPlay so you can't just download a specific patch and overwrite the files. Even via less legal channels often all the patches are not available or you need to download the whole game with it.

While I like automatic and easy patches, I wish Steam etc provided a method to revert a patch should the user want to do that. For example Far Cry 4 1.8.0 was running perfectly fine for me whereas 1.9.0 is a flickering mess on SLI.
 

Mesoian

Member
Capcom continues to be a backward company that is completely out of touch with modern gaming?

I am shocked.

SHOCKED.

Well not that shocked.
 

Junahu

Member
I had no idea that RE5's DLC was that far behind. It's insane that they'd even bother to release it at that point, and baffling that it would come at the cost of co-op.

Of course. Some higher up didn't appear asking some programmers to remove shit. The root of the problem is how these executives don't understand what implications doing things like these have.
I'm not following, the executives had nothing to do with it, but they're still liable somehow?
 

Hellraider

Member
I'm not following, the executives had nothing to do with it, but they're still liable somehow?

Read the entirety of my previous post again. Not having direct input doesn't mean they are not at fault. They are still the ones calling the shots (where shots in this particular example is RE5's transitioning to steamworks as well as porting the DLC on PC).
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
I feel like there might be some confusion in the thread that should be cleared up a bit.

The original RE5 release did not have Co-op on PC. However, remnants of the co-op code were still present in the game and modders simply needed to find a way to enable it making co-op a recognizable reality for the game.

Since RE5 was a Games for Windows Live game, they wanted to transition off of it and bring it to Steamworks. When doing so, one of the first things they did (according to a changelog they left in the games install directory) was to "Ripped out the Split Screen code." Currently, Sectus is working on a splitscreen mod for Steamworks RE5 and is running into quite a few roadblocks that he might not run into if he would have had the ripped out splitscreen base to build off of.

A person might think "Well, then just download the old version and use that if you want to play splitscreen." The issue is that with the Steamworks port, Capcom also ported over the Gold Edition DLC to PC which had previously never been released there. If someone wants to play that content splitscreen, they will not have that option.

So, to be fair, from a front facing view the only changes in RE5 are that
  1. The game was ported to Steamworks and had GFWL stripped out
  2. The DLC was ported over and can now be purchased for the PC version

So technically, nothing was really stripped from the game based on what Capcom was originally promising in the purchase package. The problem is that a step was taken to remove code (perhaps it helped with project management to just strip out everything they deemed non-essential, I don't know the reason) that would have been a huge boon to the modding community to help keep the current release at feature parity with the previous release.

I wouldn't throw Wbacon under the bus here for what he's said. He isn't a programmer, he's a community rep. If the developers told him the code "simply does not work on a PC." and that "if you plugged in two Xbox controllers, RE5 has no way of figuring out which gamepad controls which character" he doesn't have a reason to doubt them up front. We, as a community though, do absolutely have a reason to doubt that. That reason being, we know it's possible because someone had already done it.

So that's where this stands right now. Lets hope Capcom does something to help splitscreen come to PC since RE5 is very majorly a co-op game and is hugely benefitted by splitscreen.
 
I feel like there might be some confusion in the thread that should be cleared up a bit.

The original RE5 release did not have Co-op on PC. However, remnants of the co-op code were still present in the game and modders simply needed to find a way to enable it making co-op a recognizable reality for the game.

Since RE5 was a Games for Windows Live game, they wanted to transition off of it and bring it to Steamworks. When doing so, one of the first things they did (according to a changelog they left in the games install directory) was to "Ripped out the Split Screen code." Currently, Sectus is working on a splitscreen mod for Steamworks RE5 and is running into quite a few roadblocks that he might not run into if he would have had the ripped out splitscreen base to build off of.

A person might think "Well, then just download the old version and use that if you want to play splitscreen." The issue is that with the Steamworks port, Capcom also ported over the Gold Edition DLC to PC which had previously never been released there. If someone wants to play that content splitscreen, they will not have that option.

So, to be fair, from a front facing view the only changes in RE5 are that
  1. The game was ported to Steamworks and had GFWL stripped out
  2. The DLC was ported over and can now be purchased for the PC version

So technically, nothing was really stripped from the game based on what Capcom was originally promising in the purchase package. The problem is that a step was taken to remove code (perhaps it helped with project management to just strip out everything they deemed non-essential, I don't know the reason) that would have been a huge boon to the modding community to help keep the current release at feature parity with the previous release.

I wouldn't throw Wbacon under the bus here for what he's said. He isn't a programmer, he's a community rep. If the developers told him the code "simply does not work on a PC." and that "if you plugged in two Xbox controllers, RE5 has no way of figuring out which gamepad controls which character" he doesn't have a reason to doubt them up front. We, as a community though, do absolutely have a reason to doubt that. That reason being, we know it's possible because someone had already done it.

So that's where this stands right now. Lets hope Capcom does something to help splitscreen come to PC since RE5 is very majorly a co-op game and is hugely benefitted by splitscreen.
Agreed. People should know that wbacon is a great community rep and that he's generally very helpful. He'll gladly listen, but it isn't his call unfortunately.
 

Squishy3

Member
Yeah, sure they can't patch the physical copy...

Pls.
If a feature gets removed in an update but you own a physical version of a game, you can delete the updated data and stay offline and play the unpatched version of the game.

If you own a digital copy, the update is applied to the digital version and there is no way to rollback to a previous version of the game without resorting to nefarious means.
 

entremet

Member
Japanese companies are going through growing pains on the PC platform it seems.

They just don't understand it. From Bamco's terrible Dark Souls port, fixed by Durante, Koei Tecmo threatening fans about mods, and now this.

Please get it, Japanese companies.
 
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