Baldur’s Gate 3 is Coming to Xbox Series X|S Later This Year

It’s official, the critically-acclaimed RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to Xbox Series X|S consoles later this year. Swen Vincke, CEO of developer Larian Studios, confirmed that after meeting with Xbox head Phil Spencer yesterday, there’s now a path forward to bring the game to Xbox players without having to ensure feature parity between Series X and Series S consoles.

“Super happy to confirm that after meeting Phil Spencer yesterday, we’ve found a solution that allows us to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox players this year still, something we’ve been working towards for quite some time. All improvements will be there, with split-screen coop on Series X. Series S will not feature split-screen coop, but will also include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series,” the studio head posted on X/Twitter.

All improvements will be there, with split-screen coop on Series X. Series S will not feature split-screen coop, but will also include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series.

— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) August 24, 2023

With a 96 score on Metacritic, Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best-rated games of 2023, ex æquo with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The game was released on PC earlier this month, and it’s coming to PlayStation and macOS on September 6. For Microsoft, having no release date for a game of this caliber was really bad PR. However, the company allowing Larian Studios to drop support for split-screen coop on the Series S seems like a good compromise to make to get Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox later this year.

In recent months, Larian Studios has been pretty public about its struggles to make split-screen co-op work on the Series S, which is why the Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 still had no release date. While both the Series X and the Series S have a very similar CPU, the Series S only comes with 10 GB of memory (with less bandwidth than the Series X’s 16GB of memory). And it also has a far less powerful GPU than the Series X, though that probably wasn’t the core of the issue here.

A lot of Xbox enthusiasts have been pretty vocal about the Series S potentially “holding back” current-gen games due to developers having to optimize their games for the less powerful console. But in a recent interview with Eurogamer, Xbox head Phil Spencer explained that game developers don’t have to guarantee feature parity for games shipping on Xbox Series X|S consoles.

“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. So for an S customer, they spent roughly half what the X customer bought, they understand that it’s not going to run the same way,” Spencer said. “I want to make sure games are available on both, that’s our job as a platform holder and we’re committed to that with our partners. And I think we’re gonna get there with Larian,” he continued.

So, Baldur’s Gate 3 coming to Xbox Series X|S later this year is really good news for Microsoft and Xbox fans. Even though Microsoft has big Xbox-exclusive games coming this fall season with Starfield and Forza Motorsport, it’s really important to not make Xbox gamers feel like second-class citizens when it comes to third-party support.