Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 won’t be coming to Xbox Series consoles anytime soon due to technical hurdles on the console side of things.

Baldur’s Gate 3 launched with massive success on PC with a peak player count of around 700,000 players at launch, with an all time high of 875,343, making it one of, if not the most successful PC game launches.  Currently, this game is on track to being a nominee of GOTY, or Game of the Year.  At the launch of the game, players were aware of an Xbox release not happening anytime soon due to technical hurdles with the Xbox Series S, Microsoft’s all-digital Xbox console for this generation.  In order for the game to launch on Xbox, expectations must be met and obligated.

Hello friend! 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.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) July 31, 2023

These expectations and obligations, are parity features.  Before the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian’s Director of Publishing, Michael Douse said on Twitter that getting split screen to work for the game is the main technical hurdle saying, “This is a huge technical hurdle, but we are unable to release the game on the ecosystem without this feature.”

According to a GameSpot article, Larian does have Microsoft engineers working with them to get split-screen to work properly, “It’s been reported that two-player split-screen is running on Xbox Series S already, but not at a high-enough quality yet to meet the developer’s standards.”  On the Series X equivelant, which is the more powerful of the two consoles, split screen is working properly, but Larian won’t release the Xbox version without the feature running on both, with the CEO saying that the feature is “a must.”

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. We hope to have an update by the end of the year.

— Very AFK (@Cromwelp) July 31, 2023

Other users on X/Twitter have speculated that a timed-exclusivity deal is the reason for a delayed Xbox release, this is debunked by Douse on Twitter, “Far from being exclusive, we have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox.”  Douse goes on to say they’re obliged to launch with partiy features with “seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently out on PC, with the PlayStation 5 release on Sept. 6, the same day Bethesda’s Starfield launches, and hopefully for Xbox sometime in Winter 2024 (not Q4 2024). Now, I’m going to go try it.