Larian CEO says Baldur’s Gate 3 will come to Xbox this year
After struggling to make Baldur’s Gate 3 work on a less powerful console, Larian has found a way to bring the RPG to Xbox fans before the end of the year.
Parity requirements on Xbox delayed the launch as Larian struggled to make split-screen work to a high standard on Xbox Series S consoles.
Baldur’s Gate 3 will come to Xbox this year
Earlier today, Larian founder and CEO Swev Vincke announed on Twitter that Baldur's Gate 3 would be coming to Xbox consoles before the end of the year.
Vincke said: "Super happy to confirm that after meeting Phil Spencer yesterday, we’ve found a solution that allows us to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox players this year still, something we’ve been working towards for quite some time.
"All improvements will be there, with split-screen coop on Series X. Series S will not feature split-screen coop, but will also include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series."
The Xbox release was delayed due to technical issues
Earlier this month, Larian’s director of publishing, Michael Douse explained on Twitter that the parity requirements for Xbox releases were delaying the games launch on Microsoft consoles.
Due to how expansive Baldur's Gate 3 is, the team could not get split-screen to work to a high enough standard on the Xbox Series S, a less powerful console than its more expensive counterpart.
Douse said: “We’ve said many times in the past that the issue is getting split-screen working on the Series S, which is taking more time, but is in progress. This is a huge technical hurdle, but we are unable to release the game on the ecosystem without this feature.
“Far from being exclusive, we have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox. The issue is a technical hurdle. We cannot remove the split-screen feature because we are obliged to launch with feature parity, and so continue to try and make it work.
“We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved: seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S.”
Despite this, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that the game would still be able to be released without split-screen functioning on both series X|S consoles.
He told Eurogamer: “We're taking feedback from devs including Larian, I met with them today to talk about it and I'm confident we're going to find a good solution and we're going to learn.
“I don't see a world where we drop S. In terms of parity, I don't think you've heard from us or Larian, that this was about parity. I think that's more that the community is talking about it. There are features that ship on X today that do not ship on S, even from our own games, like ray-tracing that works on X, it's not on S in certain games. So for an S customer, they spent roughly half what the X customer bought, they understand that it's not going to run the same way.”
No official date for the Xbox release of Baldur's Gate 3 has been announced at this point, however it probably won't be long now before Xbox users will be able to jump into one of the biggest games of the year.
