The biggest Xbox release of December 2023 has undoubtedly been Baldur's Gate 3, which has already raced to the peak of the "Top Paid" Xbox chart in multiple countries right now, and it'll probably remain there for some time!
As usual, the analysis experts over at Digital Foundry have taken a look at both the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S versions of Baldur's Gate 3, and in general, they've summed both of them up as qualified successes.
The Xbox Series X version is very similar visually compared to the PS5 port, with just a couple of minor differences such as a decrease in anisotropic filtering quality. The Qualify Mode largely hits its 30FPS target while the Performance Mode largely sticks at 60FPS, aside from in town areas where it can drop quite significantly.
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Here's a quote about the Quality Mode and some of those dropped frames in Act 3:
"In general play it's essentially a locked 30, including combat, cutscenes, and open-world exploration. The town of Baldur's Gate in Act 3 still poses some issues though, just like the PS5 release, and interestingly Series X seems to struggle a fair bit more in hitting its frame-time targets here, with deeper and longer bouts of sub-30fps performance."
As for the Xbox Series S, this version has a few visual downgrades but it still looks surprisingly good, and again the game mainly sticks to its target of 30FPS. There's no Performance Mode here, but the Quality Mode seems to run well.
To sum it up, Digital Foundry says these Xbox versions of Baldur's Gate 3 are basically coming in as expected, providing a "good-looking, very playable interpretation" of the game for Microsoft's two consoles.
"Overall I'd consider the Baldur's Gate 3 Xbox Series ports to be a qualified success. There are still some issues here, but this is a perfectly playable and reasonably performant version of Larian's acclaimed RPG."
Of course, one of the issues that's still plaguing Baldur's Gate 3 at the time of writing is a bug that causes saved games to disappear, and you'll still find plenty of reports about it on the official BG3 subreddit if you look around. Digital Foundry did address this briefly as well, but mentioned that the issue hadn't cropped up during their analysis.
Larian and Microsoft are both investigating the problem, although an Xbox firmware update that was intended to fix the issue last week doesn't seem to have done the trick. We'll let you know when we get more details about this.
Have you been happy with the performance of Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox Series X|S so far? Tell us below.
[source eurogamer.net]
Comments 9
It's a fantastic game, there's no doubt about that, but seeing people ignore it's major issues like bugs, saves disappearing, performance dips etc really rubs me the wrong way. Reminds me of the circlejerk with Cyberpunk 2077. From what I've seen, it's still buggy as hell and needs a ton of work, especially Act 3. This has solidifed my decision to buy the game when it hits 20 USD on the Xbox store.
It's another example of the Series X version looking and performing worse than the PS5 though. I really hope Microsoft are looking into what the root cause of this is in order to learn lessons for the future. They've got the more powerful (and no doubt more expensive to manufacture) hardware, but more often than not 3rd party games run worse than their PS5 counterparts. It's been said that the discrepancy is down to developers treating PS5 as the lead platform as it's the market leader... But back in the Xbox 360 and PS3 days you again had Xbox with the more powerful hardware and pretty much saw that advantage in every 3rd party game, despite Playstation being the market leader back then as well. Why is it different now? All that extra money MS has invested to produce the more powerful hardware, just for there to be no performance related return on that investment. I would be mad as hell if I was Phil Spencer.
@Spaceman-Spiff
Its the developers fault not Microsoft's
@Spaceman-Spiff "...more often than not 3rd party games run worse than their PS5 counterparts."
I don't think that is the case. When the PS5 does perform better in 3rd party titles, it makes the news. The opposite is not newsworthy. Digital Foundry said they don't expect the PS5 to perform better and they don't understand it. They can only speculate and talk to developers.
PS3 was ill-suited/designed for its intended purpose. As for being the market leader that gen, it entered a year later at $500 and $600. The console was ultimately on the market longer than 360 and eventually took the sales lead.
They run decently, but Larian clearly rushed it out the door to capitalize on the game awards hype. They clearly were fine with "good enough" for the Xbox version.
@theduckofdeath - The console was ultimately on the market longer than 360 and eventually took the sales lead.
This is a common misconception.
The Xbox 360 actually had more time on the market in America and worldwide.
The Xbox 360 launched worldwide by December 2005. The Ps3 launched only in Japan and America by November 2006, 11 months later. PS3 didn't launch worldwide until March 2007, 15 months later.
Xbox 360 discontinued worldwide by April 2016.
PS3 discontinued worldwide by October 2016 only 6 months later.
Japan was the only exception, the PS3 wasn't discontinued there until May 2017 13 months later, so Xbox 360 was on the market 2 months longer (total time) than PS3 and 5 months longer worldwide and still got outsold.
@Spaceman-Spiff
I doubt well ever know the exact reason though.
@MrMagic I'm in America so I am looking to the American market. I bought both at launch.
If you consider the launch and discontinue dates internationally, then you must consider which console is in available in more territories. The time of on sale for each of the consoles in each territory. Japan and much of Asia appear diametrically opposed to buying Xbox so that is a built-in cultural advantage (sales and third-party support). What were the final international tallies?
To sum it up — it's not worth the effort to find definitive answers. 😄
For a competitor to come within +/- 5 million units sold of PS sales one gen after the PS2 and on their second console is a stellar outcome. That is a win any way you slice it. Xbox would take that "loss" now.
I have played the game for plenty of hours on both PS5 and Series X so I feel confident in saying that there is no noticeable difference in performance between the two.
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