Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox Series X/S release details

While Baldur’s Gate 3 is getting a PC release on August 3, 2023, followed by a PlayStation 5 launch on September 6, 2023, there are no plans for the RPG to come to Xbox anytime soon. It has been suggested by Larian Studios that while an Xbox Series S and an Xbox Series X launch for the game is in the works, it will, unfortunately, happen sometime in 2024.

Larian’s director of publishing, Michael Douse, took to Twitter to talk about some of the issues that players are facing when porting the title to the Microsoft consoles. He stated that the issue was a technical one and that it would take them at least the remainder of 2023 to solve them.

He said in the tweet:

“Far from being exclusive, we have no exclusivity deal that prevents us from launching on Xbox. The issue is a technical hurdle. We cannot remove the split-screen feature because we are obliged to launch with feature parity, and so continue to try and make it work.”

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Why is Baldur’s Gate 3 not coming to Xbox Series X/S before 2024?

When explaining why Baldur’s Gate 3 will not be making its way to Xbox Series X/S in 2023, Larian Studios stated that the problem lies with a Microsoft policy that requires all titles to support the same gameplay features for both their current-gen consoles.

While the Series X will not cause them many problems due to how much more powerful it is, the Series S seems to be behind the delay.

Douse added:

“The issue is getting split-screen working on the Series S, which is taking more time but is in progress. This is a huge technical hurdle, but we are unable to release the game on the ecosystem without this feature.”

He continued:

“We have quite a few engineers working very hard to do what no other RPG of this scale has achieved: seamless drop-in, drop-out co-op on Series S. We hope to have an update by the end of the year.”

The Baldur’s Gate 3 developers also suggest that there may eventually be compromises that they will have to look into to be able to finally port the RPG to the Microsoft consoles.

Hence, some gameplay features might be done away with but are going to be available on the PlayStation 5 and PCs due to the Series S’ technical limitations.