Michael Douse, Head of Publishing at Larian Studios, says the team is continuing to work on that version of Baldur’s Gate 3 and more information will be released by the end of 2023.
Msoft really shot themselves in the foot with the ‘feature parity’ demand for x/s. It’s caused devs a huge headache and kept infinite campaign split screen off of the series x.
As a dev, I agree with this comment. Feature parity really hinders the iteration and patching speed.
But is that dev headache worse than if you didn’t have feature parity with X/S models, where games would have different features depending on which console you owned?
I think if you are going to have X/S type models, feature parity is something you just have to require, even if it causes headaches. The result for the customer would be much worse otherwise.
They’ve mentioned scenarios like players using split screen causing chaos in different areas of the map. Seeing as the CPU only differs slightly between X and S models, so memory is meant to be the big difference between them, if memory is shared for keeping track of everything in the map and graphics I wonder how much they’d need to scale it down to get it working on the S while keeping the world simulation the same. Then what’s Larian’s limit on how crap they want their game to look (or they/MS don’t want a big graphical difference even if they can get feature parity).
Assuming that is the cause. Whatever it is they’re presumably putting lots of developer time into it, although at this point they’re going to be focussing on the imminent releases go smoothly and they can fix bugs quickly, then get more revenue from xbox.
It’s disappointing that MS would be so stubborn about parity that they would pass an entire launch window for such a huge game. I haven’t seen this much hype for a western RPG since Mass Effect 3 over a decade ago.
I feel like Xbox is always two steps forward, one step back.