Larian Studios recently announced some changes in plans for Baldur’s Gate 3’s launch, with its PC version’s release being brought forward by several weeks, and its PS5 launch being delayed by few days. Of course, many on Xbox are continuing to wonder how long it’ll be before the highly anticipated RPG becomes available on their platform of choice as well, especially with Larian having said earlier in the year that the game’s Xbox Series X/S version is being held up due to technical difficulties.
Speaking recently with IGN, Larian Studios founder and Baldur’s Gate 3 creative director Swen Vincke elaborated on those issues, stating that the developer has found it tough to get splitscreen co-op running properly on the weaker hardware of the Xbox Series S, especially given how vast and complex the game is.
“It’s not that we planned this. Our plan was that we wanted to have a simultaneous release,” Vincke said. “But we’ve been on this game for a long time. It’s a really big game. The amount of things you can do in it is insane. I think people will be surprised when they see everything. There’s constraints we have to overcome, so we just work on them. Some take more time.”
Vincke went on to add that Larian might end up having to make “compromises” in order to gt Baldur’s Gate 3’s splitscreen capabilities properly optimized for the Xbox Series S, though he’s unsure currently what those compromises will be, or if they will even exist, since there’s still work to be done behind the scenes.
“We’re trying to be very limited in our compromises we have to make,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons why we’re taking more time also. But I don’t want to jump ahead of the development team, which is doing remarkable things. I don’t want to say it’s going to be like this until we’ve finished and decided it’s good for release.”
Vincke also revealed that Larian Studios has also been receiving support from Microsoft and the Xbox Advanced Technology Group (ATG) in order to ensure Baldur’s Gate 3 can run as well on the Xbox Series S as the developers want it to.
“We’ve certainly had support from Microsoft,” he said. “We had support from the ATG group. They’ve been doing great. They’ve been helping a lot. Everybody wants this out on Xbox. It’s not that we don’t want it out on Xbox. It’s just that, our problem — and this is us, Larian — is that we just made a very big game. And it’s a very complicated game.
“We’re also not a developer with an infinite amount of resources. We are constrained in the amount of time each platform version is tested. The more permutations you start adding to it on a platform, the more complicated that becomes.”
So how long will it be until the massive RPG is ready to launch for Xbox Series X/S? While Vincke doesn’t have a concrete idea yet, he says Larian is hoping to get it ready this year itself. Read more on that through here.
Several new details have also emerged on Baldur’s Gate 3’s max level cap, the length of its massive script, the Monk class, and more.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is set to launch for PC on August 3, and for PS5 on September 6.