Baldur’s Gate III has been and continues to be on everyone’s mind since it launched earlier this month. Practically everyone was playing it when it launched and it became the highest-rated PC game on Metacritic. Unfortunately, it was only released on PC so not everyone understands what makes the game so special. The game will be released on PlayStation 5 on September 6 but it was delayed for Xbox due to technical issues getting split-screen to work on Xbox Series S. However, this is no longer the case. Yesterday, the Founder and CEO of Larian Studios, Swev Vincke, revealed that he met with Head of Xbox Phil Spencer and figured out solution to bring the game onto the Xbox platform later this year.
Larian Studio’s Director of Publishing said that the delay to Xbox “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.”
Talking with Eurogamer about the issue, Spencer said “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.”
The solution is that Baldur’s Gate III on Xbox Series S will not feature split-screen co-op. Split-screen co-op will be available on Series X. It will still include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series. Vincke also noted that all the improvements that they have made to PC since its release will be coming to Xbox and PlayStation when Baldur’s Gate III launches on these other platforms.