Larian Studios founder and CEO Swen Vincke took to Twitter to share the good news that Baldur’s Gate 3 would be arriving on Xbox sometime this year. He said that after meeting with Phil Spencer at Gamescom yesterday, the two have come to an agreement to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox Series X this year without any drawbacks. Series S owners will have one feature missing though.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is unquestionably the biggest topic in gaming currently. Its release on PC has been a bonafide success and PlayStation users are chomping at the bit to get going this next month. For a while, it seemed that Xbox players were going to be forced into waiting an extended time to get their hands on the game, but luckily, that situation has changed.
If you decide to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series S, you will have access to cross-progression between Xbox and Steam, but you will be losing access to splitscreen multiplayer on the console. The smaller, less powerful version of the console apparently just can’t handle running two versions of the game at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, some Series S owners are voicing their displeasure at this situation. When Xbox revealed the Series X and S, they promised full parity between the consoles. If a game could run on one, it would have the same features on the other. Unfortunately, it seems that special cases might begin popping up that alter that promise.
This situation does raise some questions. How many other games have been held off from launching on the Series X because the development team couldn’t get every feature working on Series S? Halo Infinite had its splitscreen multiplayer canceled, is the Series S to blame for that?
At the end of the day, we think the sacrifice of splitscreen on Series S is worth getting Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox this year. As noted above, the game is the talk of the town right now, and an easy candidate for Game of the Year despite the stiff competition.
