Larian Studios has made an announcement for Baldur’s Gate 3 that’s been years in the making.
As they revealed in Xbox News Wire, they are preparing server stress playtesting for Patch 8 on Xbox. This is strictly for signups only, and of course, you’ll need to have already purchased Baldur’s Gate 3 for the console.
As Larian confirmed, Patch 8 will come with that one feature that delayed the game’s release on Xbox Series X|S. Split-screen co-op is coming to Xbox, and of course, without naming it we know that this feature had to be designed around just for the Xbox Series S.
One could be excused for thinking that Larian put all this effort in for nothing, since it’s been over a year since the game launched, and it’s likely most of its players have already bought and finished the game, probably the majority of them being on PC.
But as Phil Spencer argued, that Xbox Series X and S requirement will come in handy as Microsoft prepares their own Xbox gaming handheld. If Microsoft manages to make such a handheld a success, the developers themselves will jump over each other to port their games to the Xbox Series S.
But getting back to this announcement, Larian also revealed this patch will come with Photo Mode, another longstanding promise. And surprisingly enough, they found the time to add 12 new sub-classes for the game. We don’t know if these new sub-classes will be sufficient incentive for players who already finished Baldur’s Gate 3 to load it up again, but somehow, Larian still found the time to add some more content for this game to make fans happy.
With this announcement, an entire console fanway narrative is set to be retired. All the hullabaloo about the Xbox Series S not being able to run split-screen co-op may still feel fresh for some fans, but as it turns out, that all happened two years ago. Larian argued that the work they put into making it run on the Xbox Series S taught them about game development, so that they could bring improvements to other platforms as well.
But with all that time passed, one certainly wonders if Larian Studios, or perhaps Hasbro, would be interested in bringing Baldur’s Gate 3, perhaps with optimizations similar to its Xbox Series S version, to Nintendo’s upcoming console, the Switch 2. The prospect of a portable Baldur’s Gate 3, one that’s more than the ‘technically possible’ state it is on the Steam Deck, is enticing, and it doesn’t have to take as long as Microsoft’s portable to happen.
