Baldur’s Gate 3 – not available on Xbox (Picture: Larian Studios)
A reader is frustrated that, as an Xbox Series X owner, he can’t play Baldur’s Gate 3 next month but PS5 owners can.
Last year, there was a lot of controversy over the Xbox Series S supposedly ‘holding back’ the generation, because it’s not as powerful as the Xbox Series X and yet Microsoft insists that all games work the same way on both. A number of developers insisted this was true and begged Microsoft to stop forcing them to support both models the same.
For some reason though a lot of Xbox fans got upset at this and decided they knew more about it all than the people making games, so the whole thing turned into the usual shouting match and nothing got resolved.
The argument was that the Xbox Series S was also holding back the PlayStation 5, since developers try to make all their versions of a game as similar as possible, so they’re not going to do something only the PlayStation 5 can do for a multiformat game. Likewise, they’re not going to something an Xbox Series S can’t do, because then they can’t release the game on Xbox at all.
This seemed pretty straightforward to me but, like I said, I lot of people seemed to want to deny it and because there were no good examples (the main guy complaining about it worked on Gotham Knights) everyone kind of forgot about it. But now we do have a good example: thanks to the Xbox Series S I can’t play Baldur’s Gate 3 until probably next year.
The problem is the split-screen mode in the game, which I enjoyed very much with the same developer’s Divinity: Original Sin 2. The Xbox Series S hasn’t got enough horsepower to run it but Microsoft won’t let developer Larian only have it work on Xbox Series X. And Larian don’t want to take it out of the Xbox Series X version.
What this means is that there’ll be no Xbox version at all when the game comes out on PlayStation 5 next month and it sounds like attempts to get it working on Xbox Series S will delay it into next year. I’m pretty annoyed about that, as the only console I have is an Xbox Series X and since I don’t have a gaming PC I’m completely denied the chance to play the game.
The Xbox Series S is under fire again (pic: Metro.co.uk)
The Xbox Series S is very good value for money, I will definitely give it that, but it is holding back other games and now we have proof. It’s clearly not the only example either, just the only one we know about publicly – or otherwise developers wouldn’t have been talking about this last year.
Because Microsoft won’t release any sales numbers we have no idea how Xbox Series S sells compared to Series X but they have said the S is the biggest seller in ‘some markets.’ I don’t know which markets they mean, because they didn’t say, but it definitely doesn’t seem to be the US or UK. Here, the Xbox Series S was in stock, and stayed there, long before the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 were easily available.
That suggests that nobody wanted it and were happy to wait for the more powerful consoles. Clearly most people want their games to look and run as best as possible, but the Xbox Series S is preventing that.
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The simplest thing would’ve been to just cancel the Xbox Series S and make the Xbox Series X cheaper. Microsoft would lost money but they seem happy to burn $69 billion on owning Call Of Duty and Candy Crush, and it wouldn’t have been anything like that amount of money. Plus, ownership of the Xbox Series X would shoot up, which would only be more profitable for them in the long run.
Failing that, they must at least stop this policy of Xbox Series X and S games having to be identical. If you want split screen on Baldur’s Gate 3 then just get an Series X, because at the moment everyone is denied the whole game just because of one feature the less powerful console can’t handle.
By reader Johnny Blu
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A reader is frustrated that, as an Xbox Series X owner, he can’t play Baldur’s Gate 3 next month but PS5 owners can.
