Larian Studios have gone public on the issues they are running into porting Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox Series X|S. It turns out it isn’t as simple as it may look for fans.
In the past, Larian has talked about how implementing split-screen gameplay in particular was holding up their ports for the Xbox consoles. There are no contracts or exclusivity deals with PlayStation, it’s just development work on Xbox.
Now, in an interview with IGN, they reveal that the big holdup with getting the game done on the platform is – well, the game itself. Larian boss Swen Vincke explains:
“It’s not that we planned this. Our plan was that we wanted to have a simultaneous release. But we’ve been on this game for a long time. It’s a really big game. The amount of things you can do in it is insane.
I think people will be surprised when they see everything. There’s constraints we have to overcome, so we just work on them. Some take more time.”
Furthermore, Swen talked about an additional issue they ran into because of the way they were making the game. The Xbox Series S version did need particular optimization work done for it to perform at its best on that platform. However, because Larian kept adding more and more features to the game, the Xbox Series S team had to restart or revise some of their work.
Again, quoting Swen:
“It was very hard for them to do this when the game wasn’t ‘finished finished’ yet, because all the content kept on coming. Now they have everything, so they see what they’re up against.”
Swen also says that Larian may ultimately choose to release Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series X|S with compromises, but there’s a silver lining too. Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) is now directly helping them with the Xbox Series S port, to speed up that work. Depending on how things play out, maybe no compromises will even be necessary.
Ultimately, Swen hopes they can also release the Xbox Series X|S versions this year, because the game is nearly finished. We’ll let him round things up here:
“We want this game finished. It’s ready. It needs to get out there. We want players to play it. We want as many players as possible to play it. So it’s in our own best interest to bring it out on all platforms.
We are doing everything we can, but we don’t want to compromise as we’re doing that. We want to make sure that when you get it in your hands you say hey, this is really good, I want to play this with my buddies in multiplayer.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is now planned for release on PC with Windows and MacOS on August 2, 2023, and then on PlayStation 5 on September 6, 2023. As we had explained above, an Xbox Series X|S version is on the works but has no release date yet.
