Baldur’s Gate 3 Delay Shows The Xbox Series S Still A Headache For Developers
Baldur’s Gate 3 Delay Shows The Xbox Series S Still A Headache For Developers
As Baldur's Gate 3 holds its Xbox launch while it optimises for the Series S, the lower-powered console is once again under fire.
I'm not sure Microsoft did this generation of consoles any favours by launching the Series S.
For those curious Swen spoke a little about the issues with Xbox they've been having and why they haven't officially announced the game for Xbox yet in this interview on SkillUp a few days ago.
Basically, the gist is that it's just not ready yet. They are currently trying to optimize it well enough so it runs 60fps even with 4 player co-op split screen which is a tall ask for the series S. Rather than hold PC and PS5 back they are instead focusing on their release and then will continue to work on Xbox after much like they did with Switch for DOS2.
Although this is frustrating for XSX owners like myself, it is absolutely the right thing to do. I've played a little bit of early access on Stadia and I hope all the PC and PS5 players are having a blast.
The Series S specs exceed all the listed minimum specs on the BG3 Steam page for PC. How is the Series S holding anything back when they apparently support their game on shittier PCs?
The problem is that they have couch coop play. They struggle making it work with Series S. From what I understand, they cannot just make a separate version without coop just for Series S. All game features in Series X must also be available on Series S. I guess that’s a limitation imposed by Microsoft.
With PC you don’t have that limitation. If your computer can’t do couch coop then too bad for you. Minimum specs probably doesn’t account for coop.
I’m not sure why they don’t remove couch coop completely from the Xbox versions. Probably because they think it’s removing too much of their vision of the game.
Probably because MS wants feature parity for both consoles where every feature runs at acceptable frame rates. Like the minimum PC spec most likely runs split screen like dog shit. But MS will not accept that for the Series S. While PC gamers with weak hardware accept that the game will not always run optimal
It may be due to Microsoft demanding certain minimum configurations: at the very least minimum resolution and minimum frame rate. On PC you can always go down to 240p and/or live with 10fps in very high density scenes. Microsoft can (and will) just say "no" if they try that on the Xbox S
My PC is above minimum specs and BG3 ran really poorly even on low. Maybe they got a similar issue with the s.
Yeah that’s the problem, they obviously lie about minimum specs on PC but that is OK for some reason. Xbox enforcing a quality experience for its users is somehow “holding the industry back”.
But the Series S doesn't run the PC game. Just like PC's don't run the Series S version of the game. I'm confused. If it was so easy, why isn't every game available on every platform on day one?
I have a feeling all of these complaints about supporting the Series S will disappear once the Switch successor releases and devs have a new console with weaker specs to complain about
For those interested, a certain analytics company claimed on vague terms that certain markets sell more Series S than X consoles.
So that suggests, if Microsoft had never released that lower-power console, they’d be selling fewer of the pair this generation.
Ultimately, this issue seems specific to the devs’ wish for a 60fps 4-player split screen mode, something that certainly does seem computationally expensive even if resolution is lowered.
That article is from 2021 and doesn't provide links or details to any data. The claim in the article says it's 50/50. But again, no data is provided.
“No data provided” is going to be relatively common for sales of consoles/games, especially when going specific to certain markets. That data is literally valuable, and might be purchased by publishers looking to make development or release decisions.
As such, when we do get it for free articles, it’s from relative comparables, like “More oranges than apples”. Anyone in comments that happens to work for a publisher is likely under NDA agreement not to just give it out.
I agree that I’d like to see more recent data, and made an effort to find what I could - but it’s also hard to say if any specific change in circumstance might reverse sale rates between the two models.
I don't think it suggests that at all. I think people just saw their options, and went for the cheaper one. If there was no cheaper option, they would've just bought the X.
Well, there is a decent chance they would have gone for the PS5 instead.
Developers can shit on series S as much as they want, but if Microsoft relax the feature parity it would be a death sentence for the series S.
The game looks boring as hell anyway.
They had to optimise for a shitload of PC configurations, yet two Xbox ones are somehow difficult?
Not the same thing. Games aren't built for every specific PC configuration. You've always adjusted graphics settings on PC depending on what your machine can run.
Ok eli5 how that's not the same. If you had said "the Series Shit™ is weak sauce" I would have understood. But if that's not the case, what stops the devs from turning the graphics dial all the way down to "washed out pixel mess" to accommodate the very much PC-like hardware. For which you don't have to worry about players messing with the config because you simply don't let them.
Because low spec PC owners usually accept bad frame rate or graphics when playing high demand games. They can't afford to do that for console players, because MS/Sony will demands a minimum acceptable performance