If I’m not mistaken, all of the UI and HUD elements are handled through Autodesk and that one can be a b word to work with.
But yes, it’s not an issue of whether or not they can do it. It’s an issue of whether they are able to spend the time and manpower to get it done.
My belief is that switching game engines halfway through development was a horrible idea. They’re stuck playing catch up while they’re under contract with the publisher to push out the content on time.
I agree 100%. Having worked for a company that was a slave to shareholders, we made a lot of bad, and possibly unethical (yet still legal) decisions to meet monthly and quarterly goals. And we looked to sacrificing babies when it came to end of year numbers. Luckily it never came down to that… 
But maybe once they get the Season Pass stuff out the door, they can do a real “Community Love” patch, fixing all of the stuff they broke pushing DLC out too early. But I’ve gotten used to the split-screen now. I use that setup for farming and I rarely notice it except when I’m messing with inventory or skills or mayhem modifiers. Pretty much as long as I stay out of the menus it’s fine.
Plus when I play with my friends, “solo”, it’s like a whole new world with the full-sized graphics. 
Deliberate to… upset their audience?
I’m sure there’s a reason it hasn’t been implemented besides “oh gearbox is lazy and they hate us”.
Yes, deliberate. I don’t know the reasons why, but a conscious decision was made to not support vertical split-screen. This isn’t a bug that snuck in during the final build. This isn’t a limitation on the game engine or hardware. They built a UI for the horizontal version, it didn’t happen through random code-generation. A decision, a deliberate choice, was made to only provide horizontal.
At some point, someone internally had to have provided feedback very similar to what many in the player community have been saying since day one. And if not internally, then at some point a beta tester had to have said something. Or at any point during the past 10 months you can find a tweet or post after every Thursday update asking about it.
They continue to ignore us, and that is also deliberate.
And there’s a 1300+ post thread here about it.
There was most certainly a decision made. Honestly split screen feels like it was tossed in last minute just so they could say they had it in there. It was probably coming down to the wire for launch day and vertical was on the chopping block to finalize everything.
I personally prefer horizontal, but that’s not even playable in its current form. That said, vertical needs to be an option for those who prefer it.
Well this is just such a sham, we should just start the class action now!
Split screen probably was something added near the end of the build for consoles. Judging from the performance complaints on consoles the game was probably ported there after they’d finished the PC build as I’d noticed far more complaints by console players that sounded like they could be attributed at least partially to hardware stress.
That would be my guess.
i think BL3 is not optimized for consoles (ps4). I actually wanted them to remove marcus voice over, animations in skill trees etc. etc. if that would improve performance.
Many of the issues I have faced on Xbox appear to be a result of the devs not testing on consoles throughout the cycle. You can’t just port some code and expect everything to work the same. I’ve always said that it’s clear the devs never played this game on a console personally.
Chances are they did test consoles, but virtually on a high end work bench.
They might as well have done the back-of-napkin math and said, “It works on paper”, for all the good their “testing” it did me.
GBX certainly didn’t show off any split screen gameplay before launch that’s for sure. Come to think of it, I can’t recall a time GBX has shown any of them playing split screen. I would comment further but I tend to hurt feelings around here when I do.
Lol, they’ve had a live stream show called “Couch Co-op” where they just played on PC sitting next to each other.
So what you are saying is if I were to purchase another television, Xbox console and copy of the game I too can have true “Couch Co-op” just as long as the wife and myself sit on the same couch? If only I read that fine print BEFORE I pre ordered the game…over a year ago.
I’m of the mind and friend group where everyone has their own PC. I feel like couch co-op with split screen (not two systems and two screens next to each other) is for sleep overs!
Everyone! Get your own PC!
I think the last thing I played couch co-op on was Phantasy Star Online Episode 1&2 on Gamecube. And framerate went to total crap when playing it 4 player split screen whenever someone used a tech as a force class character…
Don’t forget to also purchase an XBox Live subscription to satisfy the multiplayer console paywall. Gearbox removed LAN play between two consoles, and I am sure that Sony and Microsoft did not protest that decision.
Oh yeah…gotta get that as well, ugh…Hard to remember all the things I have to purchase now just to play with my wife. I don’t know how we managed with BL1, BL2, BLTPS.