You may have seen today that Baldur's Gate 3 has received a PC release date of August 3rd and a PS5 release date of September 6th, but there's been no sign of an Xbox date. There's a good reason for that - the game's not ready yet!
Speaking to IGN, developer Larian explained that the Xbox Series S version of Baldur's Gate 3 isn't running the game well enough in split-screen mode right now, with the studio blaming the issue on BG3's overall size and complexity:
"You're very free in what you do, more free than people expect. That means you can run into a really big city that's much more dense than people expect. You can do all kinds of craziness, so it requires a lot of optimisation. On certain platforms we're just faster than on other platforms. It just takes us time. That's the reality of development."
Microsoft has brought in engineers from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) to try and get Baldur's Gate 3 working effectively on Xbox Series S, and according to Larian, this has been a big help.
The hope right now is for the game to launch on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S at some point in 2023, although this isn't a promise. The intent is to only make "very limited" compromises at most, which is also why it's taking more time.
According to IGN's knowledge, Microsoft is still mandating feature parity across Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, so even if the studio decided to ditch split-screen for the latter, it seemingly wouldn't be allowed. It sounds like Larian is still very keen to get it working effectively on Series S anyway, so here's hoping a solution will be found soon!
"Everybody wants this out on Xbox. It's not that we don't want it out on Xbox. It's just that, our problem — and this is us, Larian — is that we just made a very big game. And it's a very complicated game."