Baldur's Gate 3 Will Come To Xbox This Year, Dropping Split Screen On Series S
24.08.2023 - 20:49
/ thegamer.com
/ Swen Vincke
/ Series S
/ Will
Baldur's Gate 3 has been in the wild on PC for a few weeks now, with the game's PlayStation launch coming in a matter of days. Unfortunately, there's still no release date for the game's planned Xbox launch, and it's because developer Larian Studios has been struggling to get the game's spilt-screen coop mode working properly on Xbox Series S. Xbox makes it clear that it wants feature parity on both of its consoles, which meant that Larian couldn't ship the game on Series X without getting split screen sorted out on Series S first.
However, it seems like Microsoft has had a change of policy over the past few weeks, as Larian co-founder and Baldur's Gate 3 creative director Swen Vincke has revealed on Twitter that Baldur's Gate 3 will be coming to Xbox console this year after all, as the company has allowed them to release the game on Series S without split screen.
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That means that Baldur's Gate 3 will officially become the first title on Xbox to break feature parity between Series X and Series S. Of course, the Series X has additional features such as ray-tracing and other graphical/performance improvements over the much weaker Series S, but this is the first time a game has launched on both systems that has had to cut out a feature as big as a whole mode on Series S.
It's fairly unlikely this will be standard practice going forward, so Series S owners shouldn't have too much to worry about just yet. It's been clear that Larian has been trying to get split screen to work for a long while, and the game's massive popularity over the past few weeks will no doubt have swayed the higher ups at Xbox to come to a compromise. It would've been bad for Xbox fans to be left out for so long just because split screen on Series S was next to impossible to implement properly.
This does give more ammuntion to the Xbox Series S skeptics though, as it's regularly argued that the console has been holding current-gen gaming back due to its weaker perfrormance, and potentially adds more work for developers that want to launch their games on Xbox. This isn't something that Vincke himself agrees with, but it's a pretty clear sign that it's something devs have to take into consideration.
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