Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to Xbox ‘this year’

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios says that the huge RPG will be on Xbox soon, albeit without split-screen support on the Xbox Series S.

There’s a big subset of gamers that have not yet been able to experience the chaotic joy of Baldur’s Gate 3 — console players. While we know that BG3 is releasing on the PlayStation 5 on September 6th, Xbox players have had no idea when to expect the game to hit their console of choice.

That situation got a little clearer with a tweet from Larian Studios’ CEO Swen Vincke saying that Xbox players can expect Baldur’s Gate 3 “this year.”

Vincke writes that “all improvements will be there” for the Xbox version of the game, though he noted that the Series S won’t have split screen co-op. Also, cross-save progression for BG3 is only confirmed to work between Xbox and Steam, potentially barring cross-play between PS5 and Xbox players.

While the announcement is good news for Xbox players looking to get in on the fun, it reveals the difficulty studios have had developing next-gen games for the Series S. According to a July post from Larian Studios’ director of publishing; it was proving technically prohibitive to get the split-screen feature to work on the less powerful Series S.

And since typically, Xbox requires that a game’s features be present on both versions of its consoles, split-screen was holing up a BG3 Xbox release. However, it seems that Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has given permission to Larian to launch the game without having split-screen functionality on the Series S.

While “this year” still doesn’t give Xbox players a good idea of when they can explore the world of Faerûn, here’s hoping it's not too long after BG3’s September 6th PlayStation debut.