There’s currently a question mark hanging over the Xbox versions of Baldur’s Gate 3. They are happening but they’re held up by Xbox Series S, which is struggling to run split-screen co-op at an acceptable performance standard.
An added complication is that Microsoft wants feature parity across the Series X and S versions of the games – so much so there’s a suggestion Larian would not be able to release one Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 with split-screen co-op, and the other without it.
The last we heard from Larian was that it was working on it, and that it was weighing up some “compromises” – the suggestion being that split-screen co-op on Xbox Series S could, potentially, be removed. So when I spoke to Larian boss Swen Vincke about this last week, I asked whether a decision had yet been made.
“It’s challenging,” Vincke said after a brief pause.
“The team has been working hard on making it work, but they’re still working on it. And the problem with optimisations is you finish one thing and then a new one pops up. So here, we’re dealing with a situation where we just 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.”
Does that mean, then, that Vincke is confident it happen?
“I’m confident in the team,” he answered. “If it’s possible, they’ll make it happen. But it’s a very big game.”
He added: “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.