Phil Spencer Gives His Thoughts On Baldur's Gate 3's Xbox Series S Issues

I tried it on pc and couldnt run it over 20fps ..so i asked for a refund. Ill be buying it day 1 as soons as its out on xbox

Oh didn't realise it has couch co op...I did want to buy this game but I was going to put it off because of Starfield ...but maybe I will get it on ps5 so I can try and play with the missus now I realise it's couch co op

I mean he was hardly going to blame the S was he?!

But it may take a little longer but as long as people on Xbox get the best BG3 they can then good

As someone who spent years with other crowded around a screen with friends, I have to admit there is a certain joy in splitscreen toppling Microsofts series S plans.

"Should we give the S more CPU power?"
"Nah, it's just enough"
"What about splitscreen games?"
both guys laugh

And here we are, Halo Infinite/Forza/BG3 either dropping splitscreen or holding release until splitscreen is ready.

I wish it would just get patched in later.

Guessing there likely will be some bugs with the console version of this so hopefully we’ll get the new and improved version when it gets to Xbox. Always glass half full.

I would rather see Baldur's Gate 3 get released for Xbox consoles without split-screen co-op than not get released at all, but I do sincerely hope Microsoft learns from this ordeal when designing the next generation of consoles. I would argue a lot of consumers choose a video game console instead of a PC because they expect more console games to support local multiplayer, so Xbox consoles need to be able to support it with relative ease.

Where teams are going to choose to focus their time and their effort is up to them.

It almost read like he was chastising them for wanting local coop on a ganme based in a tabletop game that is literally local coop.

The sad thing is were still at the beginning of the generation. So this is simply going to get worse as the gen progresses.

I suspect around the half way point they will either abandon the S all together like they did with the One when the X dropped or how they did with hard drive less 360s, or drop the parity clause.

One of the two will have to happen for Xbox to keep up with Playstation since Sony had the foresight to keep their hardware the same.

It is a shame though that us that dropped a premium price on a premium product are being held back due to a budget product.

That's like Volkswagen saying "Hey, if we can't have it on our Golf's, we're not puting it on our Audis".

@abe_hikura Its certainly not because of CPU power of the Series S as it has basically the same CPU as the Series X - slightly slower speed but no worse than PS5's. It also supports Multi threading too.

CPU issues are more likely down to the developers not utilising that feature because it was originally designed to release on older Single thread CPU's and/or not balancing how they utilise the CPU so a single core overloads and causes bottlenecks - not the system.

I’ll be playing it on PlayStation come September. It’s a game I would have picked up on Xbox but I ain’t waiting because of their own stupidity.

MS lucked out by having Starfield next month because it would have been a huge blow losing Baldur's Gate 3. I shell be getting it on PS5 but i hope Xbox gets it sooner rather then later and the issues are resolved.

@abe_hikura Halo Infinite dropping split screen is more so to do with the Xbox One rather than the Series S.

My partner is playing solely on her steam deck. Surely an S is closely compatible. Good for Phil to communicate the negatives and the positives. I’m personally not worried because it’s not my type of game.

@Kaloudz Also Larian spent time creating the Stadia version which they had to abandon when it got axed… for a small studio it must have cost them in development time

@Halucigens The steam deck isn't required to support splitscreen.

Microsoft made it a requirement that if the X supports splitscreen(a function BG3 has on Playstation and PC), that the S must have it as well.

So the choice is either a feature incomplete game that is better elsewhere, or to delay it until they get splitscreen working on the S.

@Halucigens
I own a steam deck andI was thinking of getting BG3 on my it but have decided to purchase on PS5 as according to an awful lot of players on Reddit act 3 is unplayable.

@Mendax
How exactly is it slowing down gaming?

Games keep getting better and better from what I have seen. And frankly if anything is slowing down gaming it is when developers target Switch.

The Series S is way more important to xbox than BG3.

I'm more worried about the power consumption of unreal 5 that is bottlenecking AAA games on Series X and PS5 than I am about a small developer not having the resources to prioritize their xbox versions.

Time to get a PS5. Xbox Series S is holding Xbox Series X back…

RPGs are a more natural fit for PC anyway, so launching there first makes sense. . Releasing it on PC before Starfield is good timing for both Bethesda and Larian. Otherwise these gigantic, years-in-development efforts are going to be in competition.

For the same reason, releasing it on Xbox some months after Starfield works out for everyone.

Finally, as the game still seems to have performance issues in the later stages, it looks like they have some optimization work left to do. As long as the Xbox version releases in good shape, I don't feel anyone is missing out.

@abe_hikura are you aware the cpu it's the same, the difference is in ram and gpu.

Back in the good old days, say N64, the split screen graphics were noticably worse or a lower framerate than the singleplayer experience, so it must be more than simply the number of pixels being pushed.
Thinking this through, the issue is likely the XSS GPU which is roughly 1/3 the power of the GPU in the XSX. With a target resolution of 2560x1440 (roughly 40% of 4k) this is fine for single player games where the developer switches off a few effects, however when doing couch coop you need to render two scenes simultaniously, I suspect each half of the screen will require more than 50% of the available resources especially if you want to play with a reasonable level of prettyness.

@GunValkyria I'd say it's more like you paid for a economy ticket on the same plane but find out afterwards your economy ticket doesn't include the whole flight

The trouble is MS sold the SS as having feature parity. I'm not saying it would happen but if MS says SS support is optional then that opens a whole can of worms.

@robe Exactly. If the players are in entirely different locations, the game will have to render 2 different sets of textures. Since textures are typically the biggest assets in a game, memory and memory bandwidth will become the main bottleneck.

The easiest solution would be for XSS to severely reduce texture quality, but then it's not a good look for Xbox as a whole. Huge amounts of textures, in this case due to split-screen, is a use case in which the XSS-as-a-lightweight-XSX approach does not work.

You can only blame Larion for the fact that this hasn't hit Xbox yet, as its their choice where they decided to prioritise their development time. They could have delayed launch on all platforms and implemented their own parity on the advertised launch day release platforms. Instead because it wasn't ready for Xbox, they decided to delay just the Xbox platform release.

@robe I get what you are saying but isn't it acceptable for them to release on Series S at 1080p which is 25% of the gfx power? On PC is 1440p a minimum spec?

@abe_hikura
The Series S has a Custom AMD Zen 2 8 Cores @ 3.6 GHz (3.4 GHz with SMT) CPU

The Series X has a AMD Zen 2 eight-core processor, but the Series X CPU runs at 3.8GHz per core (3.6GHz with multi-threading) CPU

Their CPU are very close to each other, the key difference is the amount of RAM and Video RAM. There is a difference of 6 gb there. So split screen can work you simply need to lower the resolution on the Series S version just like many games have done before Baldur's Gate 3. If you can get Cyberpunk, Diablo 4, and Jedi Survivor to play very good on the Series S there is no excuse.

@NintendoByNature blame ms for that and their parity clause

@Yarec123
I said this before in a previous discussion, but I think since the Series S is all digital why not leverage the power of the cloud. On the Series S, on more demanding games, it because Cloud based

@BrianRGI2X so you want them to delay a game because of a parity clause ,placed by ms on their underpowered glorified xbox one,delay a game because it doesn't work on one platform ,seriously 😂

@bert0503
I'll do you one better why not get a PS5, the corded to the system Playstation VR 2, and the Playstation Portal. And then sit around and wait for Sony to release more games. I guess you have Spider-Man 2 to look forward to. What after that? I'm not sure

@ZuneTattooGuy Yeah would be good if they could enhance processing on the S with cloud. I wouldn't want it play the whole thing through Gamepass Streaming as that runs like junk on my connection 😞

@Yarec123 No one told you to buy a Series S, a digital only system, when you knew you had a junk internet connection

@BrianRGI2X personally I'd say 1080p is fine, I'd even be happy with noticably worse graphics so long as the core gameplay was still good.

@Qwiff I suspect people would understand they'd bought a device that is significantly cheaper than the XSX and that in some places this will mean a compromise.

@ZuneTattooGuy I understand what you're saying in regard to the cloud, but there will be a large number of people who bought the Series S to pair with an older 1080p TV. Some of which won't have an internet connection suitable for game streaming and that wouldn't have been a consideration at the time of purchase. There is a big difference between having to be patient to download a game and trying to stream a game with a slow connection.

@robe the issue is the 10GB shared memory, it's going to be an issue fot devs the whole generation.

@ZuneTattooGuy I don't think you're understanding. I've got 400 meg fibre and games download in a few minutes so why would I use Cloud? Cloud still runs nasty. I bought the S for the kids to use when I'm on Series X.

If the cloud works fine at your house then I suppose everyone else's is perfect too.

Also really good to hear their focusing on the importance of price point and not going all in on the model of "oh well, gaming's just something really expensive, #dealwithit" Gaming would be dragged into everyone buying dual 4080's if most of the industry types had their way.

@Jenkinss yes it could also be that, the reason I was thinking more about the GPU is simply, once the level and graphics assets are loaded into memory they could be shared for both players, similarly objects within the program/code could also be shared for both players. So, while doing my armchair analysis I figured that if 10GB RAM was enough for single player then it's likely not where the bottle neck is, as having a second player wouldn't mean loading in a whole new world but simply spinning up some extra objects in memory to represent the second player. Wheras the GPU has to pull double duty by rendering two seperate scenes, I figured this would have a similar impact as something like VR, where you're within the same game world but having to render a scene for each eye.
All that being said, if the memory is shared between the CPU and GPU then it could well be the amount of memory and how it's allocated that is part of the problem, due to the increased footprint from rendering two scenes.

@Yarec123

400 mbps fiber sounds sad, but is still more than adequate to run Cloud gaming

@robe
I'm not saying use the cloud option for all games just for overly demanding games or for lazy developers like Larian Studios who can't seen to get a fairly basic title to run on a system that everyone can run it on. If they can get it to work on the Steam Deck they can get it to run on the Series S

@ZuneTattooGuy I may even go to the 900Mbps package next time my renewal comes up if the prices are right. Totally overkill but I can lord it over my friends in villages who are stuck without fibre

So he's going to continue to force developers to develop an inferior version of their product just to boost MS profits? Yeah because that's a brilliant way to get developers to work with you.