Alright, let’s talk about getting split-screen going in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Had a friend over the other weekend, and we figured we’d jump into some MW2 on the big screen together, old-school style.
Getting Started (and a quick dead end)
So, first thing, booted up the game. My initial thought was, hey, let’s try the campaign. Some older CoDs let you do campaign co-op. Fired it up, went through the menus… nothing. Couldn’t find any option anywhere to add a second player. Did a quick check online later and yeah, confirmed it. The campaign in this MW2 is strictly single-player only. No split-screen, no co-op there. Bit of a letdown, but okay, moving on.
Trying Multiplayer
Next, we headed over to the Multiplayer section. This seemed like the most likely place for split-screen to work. Grabbed my second controller, made sure it was paired up with the console. Turned it on.
Once the second controller was active, I saw a prompt pop up on the MW2 multiplayer menu screen. It was somewhere near the top or bottom, can’t remember exactly, but it basically said something like ‘Press X/A to Join’ (depending on your console, obviously). My friend pressed the button on their controller.
The game then asked the second player to log into an account. This is key – you usually need a separate profile (like a PSN or Xbox account) for the second player. A simple guest account might work on some platforms, but we just used my friend’s actual profile to be safe. They logged in.
Into the Game
Boom! Suddenly, their operator popped up next to mine in the lobby screen. Success! We were both showing up. From there, it was pretty straightforward. We just navigated the multiplayer menus like normal.
We decided to jump into a standard Team Deathmatch game. Selected the mode, waited for the match to load. As soon as the map loaded up, the screen divided. I think it split horizontally by default, giving us the top and bottom halves.
Performance seemed alright. Obviously, your field of view is cut down quite a bit, which takes some getting used to. But the game ran smoothly enough on my setup, no major lag or issues caused by the split-screen itself. We played a few rounds like that.
We didn’t try Spec Ops modes this time, but I reckon it probably works there too in a similar way, as those are designed for co-op. The main thing is just knowing you gotta head to Multiplayer or maybe Spec Ops, connect that second controller, and have the second person log in. Definitely no campaign split-screen though. So yeah, it works, just gotta be in the right modes.
