SUMMARY
- Baldur's Gate 3 bagged the Game of the Year in both TGA and Steam Awards.
- Larian's biggest game is now available for Xbox Series X/S.
Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3 has finally arrived on Microsoft’s consoles. The game has had a phased launch, wherein it was first released on Windows for PC in August 2023, followed by PlayStation and MacOS in September. The Xbox players had to wait a little longer to get the game on their consoles.
The award-winning game arrived late on Xbox due to feature parity issues with the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Nonetheless, after months of leaks, rumors, and desperate demands, the wishes of the players finally turned into reality last month.
Baldur’s Gate 3 available on Xbox Series X/S
Larian Studios, at The Game Awards 2023 announced that the biggest game of the year would be available on Xbox December 7, 2023, onwards. Several Xbox users had been eagerly waiting for the game to arrive on their console amidst all the hype, recognition, and positive reviews that the game was receiving.
There were several leaks about when the game would arrive on Xbox, with several users speculating that the release would be pushed to 2024. However, in November Larian confirmed that the game would arrive in December itself, and it did at The Game Awards.
Here’s a look at the most nominated games at #TheGameAwards on December 7.
ALAN WAKE 2 and BALDUR’S GATE 3 lead the pack with 8 nominations each.
🗳️ Vote now: https://t.co/ExP93r9hmS pic.twitter.com/hPcXqYviDL
— The Game Awards (@thegameawards) November 13, 2023
After bagging the Game of the Year award, Larian Studios shadow-dropped Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series X. They posted on X saying, “Xbox players, it’s party time. Baldur’s Gate 3 is now available for Xbox Series X|S; start your adventure today!”
Reports suggest that the Xbox Series version of Baldur’s Gate 3 was postponed because Larian Studios was unable to get the game’s split-screen cooperative play mode working on Microsoft’s Xbox Series S. Generally, Microsoft has a prerequisite that the games need to be the same on both current-generation consoles, namely, Series X and Series S. However, made an exception for Baldur’s Gate 3, after all, they did not want their players tp miss out on 2023’s best game.
Differences between Xbox Series X and Series S versions of Baldur’s Gate 3
The Series X and Series S version of the game are pretty much in almost all aspects. The game offers predominantly two graphic modes across all its consoles, namely, Quality and Performance. In terms of resolution, both versions run at a native resolution of 1440p in Quality mode, eventually upscaled to 4K, and at a lower resolution, in the ballpark of 1080p in the performance mode.
Similarly, both versions target a frame rate of 30 FPS in Quality mode and 60 FPS in performance mode. The only aspect that the two consoles differ in is the split screen. The main reason for Baldur’s Gate 3’s late arrival on the console was that Series S could not support it.
Thus the makers decided to get rid of it. As a result, the split screen mode in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not supported in the Xbox Series S version but is fully functional on Xbox Series X consoles.