Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 has been generating a lot of hype following the recent Panel From Hell. While the PC version launches on August 3rd, almost four weeks before its original date, the PS5 version will release on September 6th. There are Xbox Series X/S versions in the works, but for now, Larian is working on resolving issues with split-screen on the Xbox Series S.
Larian Studios has discussed “compromises” to get it running and is working with Microsoft and the Xbox Advanced Technology Group. Speaking to Eurogamer, director and studio CEO Swen Vincke said, “It’s challenging. The team has been working hard on making it work, but they’re still working on it. And the problem with optimizations is you finish one thing, and then a new one pops up. So here, we’re dealing with a situation where we go through the motions. The team will manage because they managed to make [Divinity: Original Sin 2] run on the Switch – but it took time.”
Vincke is “confident in the team,” though. “If it’s possible, they’ll make it happen. But it’s a very big game.”
Delving further into the issues, he compared them to Call of Duty’s multiplayer. “Somebody told me [something] the other day, and I thought it was a really good way of saying it. They were talking about Call of Duty, and they said every single time there’s a player that comes in, you get a little zone around the player, and the more zones you have, the slower it becomes.
“We have the same thing in a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, where it’s all fine and well if you have one character walking around the city, but if the party splits up and four characters are going in four different directions in the city, and they start doing the crazy s**t that I’m doing – fireballs, [etc.] – it’s a lot of simulation that has to happen on one screen. And so that’s taxing. That requires memory.”
If Baldur’s Gate 3 can’t run in split-screen on Xbox Series S, could Larian potentially remove it? Vincke responded, “Well, if you talk about feature parities, split-screen is a must for us, and we don’t want to release it without split-screen, so we wouldn’t want to do that.”
Though there’s no release date, Larian Studios hopes to have Baldur’s Gate 3 out this year for Xbox Series X/S. As always, stay tuned for more details and in the meantime, check out the release teaser and the final Origin character, The Dark Urge.