Baldur’s Gate 3 for Xbox is in Development, Devs Working on Technical Issues - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 March 2023 / 3,545 Views
Following yesterday's announcement by developer Larian Games revealing Baldur’s Gate 3 will launch for the PlayStation 5 and PC on August 31. There were questions from fans about an Xbox version.
The developer has released a statement on Reddit saying an Xbox version is in the works, however, they are having some technical issues. The studio wants to make sure every version lives up to their standards before announcing it.
"Xbox players, we’ve seen your questions about if/when you can expect Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox," reads the statement. "We’ve had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the works for some time, but we have run into some technical issues – particularly with split-screen co-op.
"We are still working on an Xbox version of BG3, but we’re not yet confident enough to announce it. We don’t like announcing anything until we’re ready, because we don’t want to get peoples hopes up until we’re sure we can deliver.
"There’s no platform exclusivity preventing us from releasing BG3 on Xbox day and date, should that be a technical possibility. If and when we do announce further platforms, we want to make sure each version lives up to our standards & expectations. Thanks for understanding!"
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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I appreciate their transparency about the matter.
Issues aside, how is it? As a precursor to one of my favourite game series ever, Dragon Age, I'm really interested in it. Was never going to get it in early access as I wanted to play it finished.
Early access build alone (which is missing some classes and other things) has a 9/10 average user score and 87% positive user reviews on Steam.
People are making this a bigger deal than it really is. Devs have setbacks all the time, but we hardly hear about it. As long as they are able to get the game where they need it, then there really shouldn't be a "concern." Also, Larian never said anything about the Series S being an issue. Reading an article that phrases it that way doesn't confirm anything.
Something is off with the Xbox architecture. We have numerous examples of Xbox versions of games struggling compared to the PS5 although the Series X is more powerful specswise. And now this.
Not at all. Its simply a case of developers prioritising and putting more resource behind the platform they believe is going to get them the best return on their investment. Developers have a limited work force, so such decisions have to be made. Its understandable. On games where both platforms are given equal attention, the XSX build generally has slightly higher resolution. Either way,the power difference between both platforms is so miniscule that it all comes down to which one has the games you prefer.
Their having issues with getting it running good in spilt screen mode on the “S”.
Lol all that cringe was amazing , thanks for the laughs boys
Most likely Series S is causing a problem.
The game can run on a potato. I know because I played the game on a laptop from 2010 lol. Minimum specs for the PC build are well below the power of the Series S. The Series S isn't the problem. When Larian says there's a technical issue that they're needing to work on, I believe them. Technical issues don't equate to power issues.
There's still 6 months before it releases, so we'll see if they can get the issues sorted out beforehand.
Wow, this aged well. Potatoes you say? Hmm.
Series S power definitely gonna be a problem in this generation lol. Can’t deny that.
Yeah that's all I was saying. Hopefully like you said there's still 6 months left to optimize for Day 1 so they got lots of time to figure it out.
A few devs spoke out as you said, but many devs spoke out saying Series S wasn't a problem or bottleneck for them.
And they're likely both correct. CPU-heavy games will perform very well on the Series S, whereas GPU-intensive ones will struggle moreso.
But AFAIK, the main developer who spoke out against the S was the developer of Gotham Knights, and that game has performance and quality issues on every platform so that's not a strong indictment.
Yes it's going to depend on the studio and the size of the studio. The more people you have the more people you can dedicate to working on different hardware. The Control dev made it clear it's not as simple as lowering and raising resolution and textures. It was also claimed many devs want the series S requirement dropped which I imagine is true. The thing is how many devs want to speak out against MS? Especially publicly. Sure in private I'm sure they are fine saying whatever but publicly you are bashing MS and their new product at that point and that's only going to make enemies.
I don't doubt that there could be a difference between their public and their private face, but each of us would only be speculating to what that difference is. You appear to be presuming that it's profoundly negative behind the scenes, but there's little evidence for that since public commentary h as been mixed (some positive, some neutral, some negative, and not overwhelmingly any one way).
I do think the Series S could have benefitted significantly with a bit more RAM. Not even a lot more, an extra 1-2 GB would have made a world of difference. The PS4 Pro having the exact same amount of RAM as the regular PS4 (despite being designed to use larger textures) was a similarly bad decision that developers probably didn't prefer (vs. the One X having more RAM than any of its peers), so these things happen. :)
I don't see why they can't just downgrade the fidelity, and implement all the features. I have a Series S and I'm fine with that. I'd rather solid performance and all the features at a lower fidelity, than losing features or having a bad frame rate. Drop it to 1080p or even lower, reduce the amount of foilage, whatever.
There's no reason this game can't run, split-screen included, same as almost any PC game can run on any even halfways decent PC, you just might have to switch to "Medium" or "Low" pre-sets.
I agree that it does depend. Series S crushes it with code that's CPU-heavy (such as emulators). Struggles somewhat with code that's GPU-heavy.
I actually think the biggest bottleneck on the Series S is the RAM. 1-2 GB more would have made a world of difference.
But any game can be downscaled to work, it's just a question of how serious the downscaling required is.
I'll look up that Remedy quote, though. Thanks for the tip.
I played on my calculator, IT WORKED !!!
Didn't think you had it in you, congrats :)
At first I just assumed this was a low-level assumption. But apparently there is a post saying they are having trouble with co-op split screen.
If PS can do it I'm curious what the problem Xbox is having.
Definitely is an issue pertaining to having 2 entirely different models with 2 entirely different development kits with differing hardware. As nice of an idea it was for Series S to be more affordable, it's just best to have a single SKU. Puts developers into having to do more work than necessary to make 2 different versions of their game for a single platform.
PC games are built with scaling in every possible way in mind. But with a console, a very specific version needs to be made and it's doubled because of Series S
The scaling is done at the engine level.
Developers build their games with a projected hardware in mind, then it's just a matter of turning down/disabling/enabling settings to scale downwards and upwards to meet the hardware.
Reducing texture details for example doesn't require any kind of special sauce or code rewrites, it's literally a feature exposed in every game engine, it's literally a setting exposed to the developers which will reduce the demand on fillrate, ram and bandwidth.
It takes seconds.
Same with resolution, ambient occlusion, particle effects, texture filtering, anti-aliasing, even many lighting passes can be reduced or increased from the Series X/Playstatioon 5 releases.
It always baffles me how console gamers seem to think that the PC release is a far different build than the consoles, we all run the same hardware and software these days.
And yet we have Switch version of Hogwarts being the most delayed, then PS4/X1. Or in this case Xbox versions. For all the call that it is very simple scaling/porting all the time we see cases that prove it is a lot more problematic.
The Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch have a different hardware feature set.
It's actually not that hard to backport games... But it is however, difficult to backport games and still make them look good.
It's why towards the end of a generation, cross-platform games tend to look like a step back, because developers are cutting features/effects, rather than replacing them with simpler/cheaper effects that may require artists to make a pass over assets.
I.E. For Hogwarts they will likely abandon dynamic lighting and bake that in the texture work, which will take development time.
So no. It's not problematic. They are just taking more care rather than have a Black Ops 3/Dragon Age 3 situation on Xbox 360 all over again with muddy visuals.
Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there is only one dev kit for the Series X|S that is shared.
You are correct, they confirmed séries S problems.
https://wccftech.com/baldurs-gate-3-team-explains-why-the-game-isnt-launching-on-xbox-consoles-alongside-ps5-and-pc/
What part in this article does Larian confirm the Series S problem? If you read the article, it's only phrased that way. A lot of people jumped the gun on this one.
"...as Larian has been working on an Xbox port for a while now but has encountered problems in making the split-screen co-op mode work exactly the same way on Xbox Series S and X. Larian underlined this is a requirement before they can ship the game to Xbox..."
It's hard to imagine that Series X is the cause of problems, so it's natural to believe that the problem is in Series S, the weaker console is causing problems. It is a reasonable conclusion.
Read the article again. Larian never said that. Who ever wrote the article phrased it that way. I recommending reading the reddit post because this is what the article is referring from and it says nothing about the Series S being the cause of the problem. Devs have on Twitter never said anything either about the Series S.
If Larian comes out and specifically states the Series S being the issue, then cool, but nothing was confirmed and now we have people acting like this is fact.
