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.
They can almost certainly fix that with a combination of a lower rendering distance (less stuff to load in the first place) combined with lower quality assets in split screen (every individual asset uses less memory). Again. This stuff is basic. Really you’re supposed to build for your minimum spec first and scale up from there. I guess they were more concerned with bear sex than getting their game to run on all platforms.
I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.
I always love when the ignorant calls other lazy for not understanding basic things about game development. They understand perfectly well what scaling is and they’re not lazy. Have you played a single second of BG3? They’re literally the opposite of lazy. You sound like a salty xbox fanboy.
It doesn’t support split screen on the Steam Deck either. If they could release without split screen support it would be out on Xbox now.
Get a proper machine then. Having a cheap Console device is a sign of laziness.
Why don’t you work harder and get a better device?
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.
Honest question: how can it be verified on Steam Deck but not run on Series S, which is more performant (at least on paper)?
Feature parity is not a requirement for Deck verification, Larian simply disabled split screen on the platform and called it a day.
Microsoft requires feature parity between Series X and S versions of the same game. If you want to support split screen on Series X then you must support it on Series S as well.
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The default profile for Steam Deck disables split screen. You can enable it but it will run like shit. It running at ~30 fps with the default profile means it can be verified.
Yeah it’s basically like a launch option that will configure it in a certain way. You can in fact with a launch option tell the game to ignore this, and play split screen on Deck. I have seen people doing it but I doubt it runs well but I guess that’s the beauty of PC/Deck gaming that you can do whatever you want to and make up your own mind.
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The problem is the memory usage for split screen multi player. Steam Deck doesn’t do split screen.
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No. You can run split screen on non-Steam Deck PCs, and in fact you can launch BG3 on a Steam Deck as if it were a proper PC with split screen enabled (it prob just won’t run well).
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The Series S is more powerful: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-steam-deck-vs-xbox-series-s-how-future-proof-is-the-valve-handheld
But the Steam Deck is a portable console, so the design considerations are different, so it’s a bit of an apple to oranges comparison. On pure numbers, though, Series S will perform better. (Steam Deck is still awesome though 👍)
 I have a series S and even I think it’s unreasonable to expect full parity with a PS5/XSX after three or four years. It’s a $300 piece of hardware - it is remarkable what it does at its price point. It will be useful for a good 10 years, but it will not be able to keep up with new games after 5 at most in my opinion. It’ll be great for Indies or back catalogs.
They need to stop trying to make it functionally a series X and focus more on making it a gamepass/xcloud machine. As it is, it’s just an albatross around their neck.
Edit: Everything signaled that they were going to make it into a xcloud machine essentially. I’m not sure why they haven’t really pushed that harder.
I feel like their planning for it was really shortsighted - like they were hoping to get a as many people to buy the console as possible so they could “win” the console war early by having more people adopt it by putting out a cheap console people who didn’t want to spend so much would be drawn to, and weren’t really thinking beyond the first few years of the generation. Maybe they figured once they had the lead, they cold get people up upgrade or something. By they didn’t get the early lead and now the cheaper console means devs can’t really fully develop for Xbox. This will only get worse as more games start getting developed.
Microsoft is terrible at Gaming. I fear how everyone seems to be ok with them buying companies up and putting games on GamePass. It’s not going to end well. It’s not even going well if you really take notice.
It’s going great for me as the consumer with Game Pass. I have had over two years of essentially free games, because Microsoft rewards is too generous and easy to exploit. But I have no illusions about whether or not this consolidation is good for the industry. It simply isn’t. Yeah I guess y’all can call me out or whatever for using it anyway, but the series S with nearly free GamePass has just been too good for me as a dad with a full-time job and children. I’m still against the merger lol
I vote with my dollar where I can, but sorry, sometimes I make compromises just like anybody else. That being said, if I have to start actually paying for it, even at the current price, I’m out. So basically it depends on when they decide they don’t want rewards to stay around.
Its going great now. The monopoly they want is to increase charges on you and you have to pay forever to keep access. This is specifically the point of gamepass.
It may workout for you in the short rub, but you are still losing choice and value (you only rent access) in the process.
As many people already boycott sony consoles due to them paying extra to game studios to never release certain games on xbox, there’s literally no alternative currently.
And Game Pass is great, if they pump the price too much, it will just seize to be relevant and life goes on. AAA games are pretty dirt cheap considering prices have increased way slower than inflation and average game complexity.
But Microsoft is doing exactly the same thing, only instead of paying for exclusivity of one title, they’re buying developers so not just their next title, but all future releases will be exclusive, up until MS decides they’re not worth it and dumps them.
Sony absolutely participates in anti-consumer practices, but let’s not pretend that MS is any better.
Day one releases on PC and Xbox, and coming later on PS5 is quite a bit different to day one on PS5, year later on PC and never on Xbox.
There’s bad, and then there’s “you’ll never play this unless you buy our console”
I think the problem they’ve given themselves is that they pushed it as a cheaper alternative to the X whilst also maintaining that it’ll be able to play the same games.
How do they go about messaging that can’t be the case going forward without pissing off those that spent the money on the S in the first place.
In almost every other case, it is playing them. BG3 is one outlier.
Only takes one though. As soon as someone looking at buying a console sees there’s a chance they’ll miss out, they’ll potentially make the decision to go with the Sony machine instead.
Microsoft already has an exclusive issue, this isn’t doing anything but compounding that issue.
Oh totally, this isn’t a good thing. At the least Xbox has its own, hopefully great, RPG coming out at the same time.
Something I’ve been saying since the beginning, nice that people are catching up…
FTA: “The Xbox Series S was cheaper, but lacked the horsepower of the more expensive Series X.”
It’s not just that, the Series S lacks the power of the PREVIOUS GEN Xbox One X. The RAM limitations makes it impossible for it to run backwards compatible titles with the Xbox One X enhancements. AND it doesn’t have the 4K Blu Ray drive present in both the Xbox One S and Xbox One X.
This is the first time a console developer has released a new machine less capable than equivalent machines in the prior generation.
This is the first time a console developer has released a new machine less capable than equivalent machines in the prior generation. PS3’s switch to cell architecture springs to mind, which put game devs on their back feet trying to write code for it and made backwards compatibility impossible without including a PS2 in the case.
Sorry but I cannot agree with that take. The PS3 was difficult to develop for, sure, but it was immensely more capable than the PS2 architecture. See what naughty dog was able to produce on it in the last years of the console lifespan.
But I do agree that for developers, the PS3 was a step backwards in terms of ease of use and tooling. And luckily they fixed that by basing PS4 on PC architecture.
Still, I flippin’ love the PS3 🥲
Well this is concerning. I’ve got a PS5 and was going to buy a XSX this week so I could pre-order Starfield, now I might wait and see how this plays out. What’s going to happen with Starfield & Elder Scrolls 6 (whenever it’s released)? The Series S is going to fuck up everything.
Why do you think Halo never got split screen 💁♂️
Cause 343 is a bad studio. Lmao
Both things are true tho.
Honestly, it’s kind of on the developer. If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves. I think Microsoft are right to stick to their guns. It will seriously piss off their consumers if they can’t land good quality versions of equivalent games on PS5.
I actually think it could be more beneficial for players across both console platforms to encourage developers to build games which scale reasonably, and at the low end target a 30 FPS minimum frame rate whilst the Series S/PS5 get 60 FPS+ or improved image quality, or both. Instead of it just being a race to the bottom on performance just so we can have a little bit of ray tracing.
Also, as far as I’m aware, Baldurs Gate 3 hasn’t released on PS5 and is not due until September. I will be very interested to see how that goes, because I think the conclusion of this article is premature until we see that.
If we take the series s as the baseline in development, we’ll get games that don’t take full advantage of the better hardware. They shouldn’t have to make their game run on potato grade hardware. I think they hit a great balance, it runs great on most modern gaming pc’s, and the series x and ps5 will have no issues running it either.
The issue here isn’t frame rate or graphics, it’s that with the memory issues on the series S, they can’t get split screen to run. It runs just fine on X, but won’t on S. Because Xbox demands parity, they can’t just disable the feature like they did for Steamdeck.
that doesn’t mean we get better games on the xss, but that we get worse games on xsx and ps5. I paid for that power, I want my games to use it. I don’t care that it doesn’t run as well on a lesser console I deliberately chose not to buy because of its lesser power
If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves.
The problem is that the baseline is actually the PS5. It outsells both versions of the Xbox by a factor of 2. So the Xbox Series S is an afterthought, and always will be.
It would be to Microsoft’s advantage to change that perspective, which would reinforce why they might maintain their hard line of feature equivalence. I agree though, it appears to be the status quo.
Except that they can’t. The only thing they can do is to give up on the Series S. Sure, that is a disaster as it means millions of Series S buyers are basically on a dead console. But they’re headed in that direction anyways.
The baseline system is almost always the most popular system. No developers should be hamstrung by MS’s bad business decisions.
I’m not sure that having BG3 run at 540p 30hz on the latest MS console will be good for Larian.
No Series S owner will be mad if a game has Series X specific exclusive content. MS is shooting itself in the foot
Problem is that it can turn into a slippery slope. Where should MS draw the line if they start to allow Series X exclusive content? Can developers cut entire game modes from the S version if they just ask kindly enough? Or maybe ignore the S version completely? The risk is that developers are going to abuse this opportunity.
MS wants people to see the Series S as a viable purchase. Why should you buy it when you won’t be able to play the next big release in full?
Yes, they should be able to say “this game doesn’t run on series S” because it’s significantly worse than the other options and it doesn’t deserve the work it takes. It doesn’t even have CPU parity, which is a much bigger deal than less GPU cores.
That will just betray all the customers who bought Series S. Will they upgrade to a Series X to play the next big thing? No, they will probably just buy a PS5 instead. Why should they continue to stay loyal with MS?
It’s not capable.
They might have made the bed and be stuck in it, but it was a bad plan that substantially sabatoges the actual next gen console.
I think people would be mad. Imagine you play a game at your friend’s home on his Series X, and then proceed to buy the game so you can play multiplayer online, only to then have a certain features or game modes missing (say you get team death match but not battle royale because it uses too much memory).
It’s not that easy to communicate feature disparity. Some people probably don’t even know which Xbox they have.
At some point, it’s on you to know what your machine can and can’t handle. They put big letters on the front of each game telling you if it’s able to play on the series X and series S. It is right there lol. 
Also, with smart delivery, it would probably be trivial for Microsoft to have a modal pop up saying “this game is not optimized for series S and will not play, do you still want to purchase?”
No, the real issue here is developers (not their fault mind you). The moment Microsoft says “you don’t have to make it playable on the S,“ they simply won’t. Because why would you? 
A dev team is more likely to axe Xbox release or features. So because S won’t have enough memory/gpu grunt, X won’t be getting that feature either.
Yep and a lot of times, we won’t even hear about it. It’ll just be another game that happens to be on Playstation and not Xbox, a defacto exclusive of sorts.
Why would they completely abandon Xbox just because the series S won’t be required? 
S is required if you want to release a game on X. This means you cannot leverage the technical maximum of X, ever, because the game and all it’s features must run on S.
Yes we know. The comment at the top of this chain is talking about whether or not Microsoft could stop allowing that requirement and the potential blowback. Scroll to the top and start from the beginning you’ll see. 
You still don’t seem to comprehend what I said. Hint: not about blowback.
If a game can’t run on the Series S it means it also can’t be ported to the PC. Turn down the resolution and graphics settings until you get the same fps target and continue in with your day.
I would expect any game from a developer that complains about this to be so poorly optimized that it runs like it would on the Series S on the bigger consoles, and likely have garbage gameplay as well because they spent all of their budget on graphics.
Ok, but game they’re talking about here, Baldur’s Gate 3, runs just fine on PC. But they can’t get a specific feature to run on Series S that can run on X. You might want to read the article before commenting?
What. None of this comment makes any sense.
I still don’t really understand this. Local splitscreen on a game the size of baldurs gate does make sense to me as being a technical hurdle, obviously rendering the game world twice is extremely taxing.
I keep seeing complaints about other games also, lots off people seem to be blaming the Series S for Remnant 2s slow xbox patches.
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU, how are games (that also release on PC) not scalable enough to run on the S at 1080p when they can run at 4k on the X? I’d love a technical answer, if I replace my 3080 with a 1060 I could run the game on my PC and a lower resolution/graphic settings. How is this different from the Series X/S? I’m not a programmer/developer and I’d really like if someone could explain too me why the Series S is a problem because from my view point it’s lazy developers with unoptimised games
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU
And significantly less RAM, which is probably the issue here.
The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU
If it was just a GPU difference, you’d be right it should be easy to just run it less pretty. But the memory limitations are the real issue. The X has 16 GB of memory and the S has 10 GB. And worse, the memory performance is drastically different. The X has 10 GB that runs at 560 GB/s and 6 that runs at 336 GB/s, where as the S has 8 GB at 224 GB/s and 2 GB at 56GB/s. (I did not miss a zero on the last value)
Holy crap that’s an absurd kneecapping with the RAM. No wonder they’re having parity issues
It has less RAM than the Xbox ONE X as well and is incapable of running backwards compatible games with Xbox One X enhancements.
Holy shit I had no idea. The Xbox One X really is more powerful, at least in some regards, than a system that came out 3 years later.
Wow i did not realize that about the ram
The main difficulty with split screen is that you need to be able to fit everything you need to render the scene into RAM, twice. Let’s go through some cases:
Just rendering to a higher resolution still lets you get away with the same amount of RAM if you use low-res textures, or a moderate increase because you’re using high-res textures, but only in the foreground – all you need is enough GPU compute power to push the pixels.
If you’re rendering VR both camera perspectives are going to be nearly identical, looking at the same objects, so RAM use is nearly identical to a single camera. Your frame time targets are much stricter in VR, you have to have high and very regular fps or people are going to puke, but again that’s compute pressure, not memory pressure.
In the split-screen case all bets are off: When players are at opposite sides of the map there may be literally zero meshes and textures in common between those two areas and you need twice the RAM for twice the amount of camera views. Nothing in common is the worst case, yes, but it’s bound to happen, and not leave PR in a situation where they have to say “We degraded performance when players are far apart to promote an atmosphere of closeness and cooperation”.
Split screen might be difficult for Series S due to memory constraints. Keep in mind that all assets both players are seeing must be loaded in memory simultaneously. This includes textures, models and animations. These assets are normally not loaded into the memory unless they’re visible by the camera. This becomes problematic if there are two cameras facing different parts of the map at the same time. Then you potentially need to double the memory requirements, which the Series S might not have.
did you think of the possibility that even Larian’s low settings still can’t run on series S? Given the amount of assets I saw it’s actually quite possible that vram requirement are pretty high and that’s why PS5 have delay as well so they can figure out ways to consolidate textures used etc. Like they can’t even manage to let me stack rope or water bottle properly in inventory(maybe some asset id not cleaned up during development), so having excessive vram usage is fairly easy/common for content heavy games.
To be clear, I’m not trying to attack Larian here. I think splitscreen is a much bigger technical hurdle than other games have to deal with and delaying it on the Xbox was the right idea. But, the PC versions minimum requirements is 4GB vram and recommended 8GB vram. The Series S has 10GB vram. I’m more annoyed by the anti Series S rhetoric going around about it holding all games back, because most games with a PC release scale no problem
What you forgot to consider is that the Xbox has to share the RAM with the VRAM. The game on PC has 8GB RAM and 4GB VRAM as minimum. That is 12GB of RAM. The Series S only has 10GB. Which is 2GB less than minimum.
Today’s Digital Foundry video suggests that this is far from the issue. Even the highest texture settings fit comfortably in 6 GB. IIRC it was around 4,5 - and consoles typically go for high rather than ultra settings.
That’s only VRAM. You’re missing the other half.
It’s unified RAM on Xbox. And medium settings are 2165MB on PC.
It wasn’t delayed on the PS5; that was the original release plan. They moved the release UP for PC because they didn’t want to have to compete with Starfield’s release. Since that’s not coming out on PS5, they left the release date as is.
Right, I forgot about this, thanks for correction.
