Larian Studios announced yesterday Baldur’s Gate III The PC version will be released for PS5 on the same day leaves Early Access. It sounded like an exclusivity deal would keep it off Xbox, but developers say that’s not the case. So what is the delay? Making the co-op RPG’s split-screen action work on the weaker Xbox Series S.
Larian revealed the launch date for the PS5 console port on August 31st in a new trailer during Sony’s latest state of affairs which included actor JK Simmons voicing the newly revealed villain General Ketheric Thorm. It’s normal for teasers promoted by Sony to omit the competing platforms, but when fans didn’t see an Xbox release date on Larian’s website either, they began to wonder.
Today the studio clarified what’s going onstating that if Larian can get split-screen gameplay to work on both Series S and Series X, an Xbox version will appear:
We see a lot of different interpretations of what that means, so we wanted to elaborate on that. We had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate III in development for some time. We ran into some technical issues developing the Xbox port that prevented us from feeling 100% confident in announcing it until we were sure we had the right fixes – most notably we couldn’t do split screen -Get co-op to work to the same standard on Xbox Series X and S, which is a requirement for us to ship.
There is no platform exclusivity preventing us from releasing anything BG3 on Xbox tag and date, should that be technically possible. As we announce additional platforms, we want to ensure that each release meets our standards and expectations.
It’s a particularly interesting crease considering gamers have long speculated about the tradeoffs and challenges involved in developing games for the similarly equipped PS5 and Xbox Series X, which must also accommodate the less powerful Series S. Split screen can be a particularly taxing feature, and it was dropped significantly Halo infinity last year as 343 Industries tried to salvage the online shooter’s live service ambitions.
Baldur’s Gate IIIMinimum PC specs already require at least an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, with a GeForce RTX 2060 recommended. While it’s unlikely the hardware will be pushed as much by PC gamers as recent blockbusters like that Empty room make new or The Callisto Protocol have, it’s still more than what the average isometric RPG fan is likely to have on hand. The console port could then potentially be a huge boon for those who don’t already have a high-end gaming PC or the funds to upgrade. That said, for now, it seems like the $250 Series S might get in the way.
