Baldur’s Gate 3‘s PC and PS5 release dates are just around the corner, and fans are still confused about the Xbox version of the game and why it is getting delayed. When it was nowhere to be found, people started worrying that maybe Sony had made some sort of exclusivity deal even though Larian promised that wouldn’t happen. PC players have been able to play the early access version of the game since 2020, while console players have been waiting for the full release.
It turns out, the cause of the delayed Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is Microsoft’s feature parity requirements. The team at Larian said that the Xbox Series S is the reason why the game is being delayed – namely, the split-screen co-op feature is taking a lot of time to implement properly.
According to Larian’s Director of Publishing Michael Douse, there is no exclusivity deal that anyone needs to worry about. The delay is due to technical reasons because of Microsoft’s requirement for feature parity between the Xbox Series X and S. This means that the Xbox Series X version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is only being held back because of the Series S.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Technical Issues on Xbox Series S
Since this split-screen feature is hard to implement due to the Series S’s limitations, this could result in the Xbox version losing the feature entirely if Larian isn’t able to make it work. The same thing happened with Halo Infinite when 343 Industries found it impossible to make split-screen mode work on the Series S and just scrapped it entirely.
Michael Douse confirmed that the studio will hopefully have some more information to share on the matter by the end of the year. Larian has a number of engineers working on this split-screen co-op matter specifically and is adamant that the feature should be seamless and make it into the final product.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming out on August 3, 2023, and the PlayStation 5 version is launching a month later on September 6. If you still haven’t gotten the game and are interested, check out our preorder guide.
