After allowing Larian to drop split-screen co-op from BG3 on Xbox Series S, Microsoft will struggle to control developers who say Series S is holding the console generation back.
the two biggest role-playing games of the year are released in a head-to-head on rival console platforms. But only one of them is a console exclusive. Starfield was acquired by Microsoft along with its developer and publisher, Bethesda, in 2021, and will be released on Xbox and PC only. Baldur’s Gate 3 — which has already become an overnight sensation on PC, if you can say that about a game that spent three years in early access — is out now on PlayStation 5, but an Xbox version is still weeks or months away. And it could have been much longer.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s developer, Larian Studios, has no timed exclusive arrangement in place with Sony or anyone else. Initially, it would not commit to releasing the game on Xbox before 2024, if at all, because it could not get the split-screen co-op mode working on Xbox Series S — the lower-cost, lower-power Xbox console. As Larian explained, Microsoft requires gameplay feature parity between Series X and Series S versions of games. It also strongly prefers feature parity with the PlayStation versions of multiplatform releases, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has split-screen co-op on PS5. If Larian could not get co-op working on Series S, it wouldn’t be able to release the game on Xbox consoles at all.
This put Microsoft in a difficult spot. Baldur’s Gate 3 was wowing critics, making huge waves on Steam, and quickly establishing itself as one of the biggest and best games of the year. To miss out on it because of a policy own-goal would be embarrassing, not to mention frustrating for Series X owners. But the company had good reasons for sticking to that policy — perhaps even high-minded ones about keeping gaming affordable.
As IGN reported, Microsoft even drafted some of its own specialist engineers to help Larian with the Series S version of Baldur’s Gate 3, but progress still wasn’t happening quickly enough. Eventually, Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer met with Larian’s Swen Vincke at Gamescom in August. Vincke, riding an enormous swell of popularity and acclaim for Baldur’s Gate 3, held all the cards, and Spencer made the unprecedented decision to allow the game to be released on Xbox without the co-op mode on Series S. The Xbox version is now expected before the end of the year.
This may seem a small enough concession from Microsoft to secure a hit game, but it’s highly significant. It may end up changing the whole Xbox hardware strategy — or, at the very least, weakening it.
Ever since the surprise announcement in 2020 that Microsoft would release a pair of game consoles this generation — one targeting 4K displays and fancy graphical features like ray-tracing at $499, the other with fewer bells and whistles and less storage, but offering full “next-gen” compatibility for $200 less — there’s been a debate about whether Series S would end up holding back the quality of Series X games, or indeed of all multiplatform releases this hardware generation.
