Larian Studios hasn’t been shy about the difficulties it’s faced in getting Baldur’s Gate 3, arguably one of this year’s biggest and most successful releases so far, in a position where it can be released on Xbox Series X|S consoles alongside its PC and PS5 versions.
The issue has been the comparatively-underpowered Xbox Series S console, which seemingly doesn’t have the grunt to get the game running acceptably in split-screen mode. Without the ability to have feature parity across both the Series X and Series S, a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox seemed like a lost cause… until Gamescom 2023.
Thanks to the power of industry meet-ups, Larian’s founder and CEO Swev Vincke has revealed in a post on X that a meeting with Xbox Daddy, Phil Spencer, has resulted in a solution agreed upon between the two where the Xbox Series S version of the game will be allowed to ship without split-screen co-op play. The Xbox Series X|S game will also feature cross-save progression between the Steam version of the game.
The studio’s clearly had an Xbox version of the game ready and waiting in the wings in some form as well, because it’ll supposedly still manage to launch it sometime this year:
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.
— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) August 24, 2023
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been going from strength to strength since it launched out of early access just a few short weeks ago, currently commanding a very healthy 96 on Metacritic (on par with Tears of the Kingdom) and shifting millions of units.
A PlayStation 5 version of the game is due to launch very soon on September 7th (AEST) for the standard version of the game and a little earlier on September 3rd for those who pre-order the Digital Deluxe Edition. You can find out more about the PS5 release and pre-load dates for Baldur’s Gate 3 right here.
