Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
Larian has delayed the release of Baldur’s Gate 3, currently on pace to possibly be 2023’s Game of the Year, until they can figure out how to make split-screen work on Series S.
Larian have disabled split screen on the Steam Deck to account for that lower power. They can’t do the same thing for the XBox S release because Microsoft demand feature parity with the X.
So drop the rendering resolution/texture quality/render distance until it runs well enough on the Series S. Aka scaling. This is basic shit that has existed forever on PC. Like I said this game runs perfectly fine on PCs with less power than the Series S.
The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won’t be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.
That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don’t know when, because that’s a lot of work and not certain.
They can almost certainly fix that with a combination of a lower rendering distance (less stuff to load in the first place) combined with lower quality assets in split screen (every individual asset uses less memory). Again. This stuff is basic. Really you’re supposed to build for your minimum spec first and scale up from there. I guess they were more concerned with bear sex than getting their game to run on all platforms.
I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.