The biggest Xbox release of December 2023 has undoubtedly been Baldur's Gate 3, which has already raced to the peak of the "Top Paid" Xbox chart in multiple countries right now, and it'll probably remain there for some time!
As usual, the analysis experts over at Digital Foundry have taken a look at both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S versions of Baldur's Gate 3, and in general, they've summed both of them up as qualified successes.
The Xbox Series X version is very similar visually compared to the PS5 port, with just a couple of minor differences such as a decrease in anisotropic filtering quality. The Qualify Mode largely hits its 30FPS target while the Performance Mode largely sticks at 60FPS, aside from in town areas where it can drop quite significantly.
Here's a quote about the Quality Mode and some of those dropped frames in Act 3:
"In general play it's essentially a locked 30, including combat, cutscenes, and open-world exploration. The town of Baldur's Gate in Act 3 still poses some issues though, just like the PS5 release, and interestingly Series X seems to struggle a fair bit more in hitting its frame-time targets here, with deeper and longer bouts of sub-30fps performance."
As for the Xbox Series S, this version has a few visual downgrades but it still looks surprisingly good, and again the game mainly sticks to its target of 30FPS. There's no Performance Mode here, but the Quality Mode seems to run well.
To sum it up, Digital Foundry says these Xbox versions of Baldur's Gate 3 are basically coming in as expected, providing a "good-looking, very playable interpretation" of the game for Microsoft's two consoles.
"Overall I'd consider the Baldur's Gate 3 Xbox Series ports to be a qualified success. There are still some issues here, but this is a perfectly playable and reasonably performant version of Larian's acclaimed RPG."
Of course, one of the issues that's still plaguing Baldur's Gate 3 at the time of writing is a bug that causes saved games to disappear, and you'll still find plenty of reports about it on the official BG3 subreddit if you look around. Digital Foundry did address this briefly as well, but mentioned that the issue hadn't cropped up during their analysis.
Larian and Microsoft are both investigating the problem, although an Xbox firmware update that was intended to fix the issue last week doesn't seem to have done the trick. We'll let you know when we get more details about this.