Developer Larian Studios has revealed that Baldur’s Gate 3 will likely be making its way on to Xbox Series X/S sometime between September and November. The RPG is making its way on to PS5 on September 6, while the PC version was released earlier this month.
“It’s 2023. And 2023 is narrowing, so it’s already pretty precise in my book. Between September and November… So, as fast as we can honestly,” director Swen Vincke told IGN.
According to Vincke, the studio is currently getting ready to launch the game on the PS5, and will be turning its attention to the Xbox Series X/S release once the first console release and the first few patches for the PC version are done.
“So the Xbox Series X version was already in good shape last time I looked at it. So we’re just going to go through the motions, ‘Okay, what do we still need to do?'” said Vincke. “There’s a bunch of stuff that needs to happen to finalize it. But I think from a content point of view and from a technical point of view, we’re actually very close.”
Vincke goes on to talk about the fact that development for the Xbox Series X/S version of Baldur’s Gate 3 was going smoothly, aside from the problems the studio faced in trying to bring local co-op multiplayer to the game on the less powerful Xbox Series S. The company has since announced that it will be skipping the feature for the Xbox Series S for the sake of bringing the game to the console.
“It was running already before, so it shouldn’t take that long,” said Vincke. “It doesn’t mean that we are not going to try to make it work also in splitscreen, because I mean as I said, the team continues to optimize for all platforms because we really want to hit 60fps across the board on everything.”
It is worth noting that the studio has expressed an interest in still bringing local co-op to the Xbox Series S version of the game, and might keep trying to optimize the game’s resource usage in an effort to make it run better and be fully-featured on the console.
The Baldur’s Gate 3 director goes on to talk about making more optimizations to the game in order to reduce its system requirements on the PC as well, with an eye to making the game available to more players on less powerful hardware. The studio has been working on keeping the game running at a stable frame rate close to 60 fps.
“The problem really with optimization is…with so many systems in parallel with multiplayer and splitscreen and what have you is… you never know where you end,” said Vincke. “And, I mean, we’ve seen people walk around with the armies of followers, with all zombies and stuff like that, and then they’re standing on top of the roof and then they’re launching fireballs across the entire city.”
“And it’s great that you can do all of that, but the machine suffers. And we want to get that as high as we can, because that will ultimately allow more people to play Baldur’s Gate 3.”
For more details on Baldur’s Gate 3, check out our review of its PC release.