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.
Lazy devs don’t understand what scaling is. They advertised this game as Steam Deck compatible which has a way weaker CPU, GPU, storage (most people are playing on an SD card), and most importantly memory bandwidth. This game runs perfectly fine on PCs with slower CPU/GPU combos than the Series S. It’s literally just laziness and knowing people will just accept their shitty excuses.
Not sure you can accuse Larian of being lazy. When was the last time you saw a PC game work this flawlessly from launch?
It’s the lack of RAM causing the issues apparently, rather than power. If they could cut the split screen mode from the S it would be fine, but they can’t.
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.
Isn’t it the split screen causing the issue, I don’t think the PC version has that. To be fair, the game does play on steam deck, but you have to knock some graphics down and lock it to 30 for a stable experience. Personally I don’t think all the panic about the series s is justified, some Devs like CDPR have done amazing optimisation for it and like you say, games will be designed for less powerful PCs for a while yet based on stream surveys.
Obviously there’s a bottleneck in BG3s design and the S hardware somewhere they’re trying to solve with MS to get the game out. It’s unfortunate that it means MS miss out on a surprise hit of the year at launch, but it’s not like their players are short of an RPG to play very soon.
