After a slight delay, Baldur's Gate 3 is coming to the Xbox Series X|S! Larian announced this on August 24th and also indicated that the team at Microsoft Game Studios was an active partner in helping them to make this happen. However, the announcement came with a slight shocker that there would be a slight difference between how the game plays on the Series X and Series S. The Series S edition will not have split-screen co-op while the Series X version will. Both consoles will have the same campaign and no story or character-related content has been removed for the Series S version and both Xbox releases will have cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series X|S.

For those unaware, the primary reason why Baldur's Gate 3 was not on the Xbox Series X|S is because Larian, still a relatively small development team, could not find ways to make many of the game's features and modes that are included in the base game work at a decent framerate and graphical setting on the Xbox Series S. Though it should be noted, Swen Vincke, BG3's creative lead, affirmed that they did not think the Series S was harming the current generation of games and compared it to developing a PC game with considerations for "minimum spec PCs and the Nintendo Switch."

Prior to this announcement, Microsoft has maintained a pretty strict rule that any game that releases on the Series X MUST have the same features and modes on the Series S. This has been a point of consternation with some developers citing issues with making the Series S's significantly less VRAM and storage as major hurdles.

Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game to force Microsoft's hand in waiving that requirement and it remains to be seen if this rule has been scrapped entirely for future game releases.

So... do we see this as a sign the S will be sunsetted in the next few years?

i think it's the right move- i appreciate their strategy with the S, but Xbox probably doesn't want to be the brand that feels second-fiddle due to their own platform rules. if a game's got heat, you kinda need it on your box.

i always thought the S should be upgraded on a intermittent basis like the base ipad- but i suppose that creates more hardware targets to devs to support, and we arrive back at a similar problem if you're looking for a uniform experience.

I think MS is in too deep to ever consider that. They sold millions of Series S consoles on the promise that all of this generation's games would be playable on it. They simply cannot back out of that at this point.

I do think we will see more games shipping with missing features on Series S as the generation proceeds, but they really can't abandon those users completely. The farthest I can see them going is maybe Series S versions of games are not available natively and instead must be played via cloud streaming, the way some generation 8 games on switch worked like RE7 and Kingdom Hearts 3. The Series is already a digital only console, so that wouldn't be too far of a leap.

I don't think so. I think Microsoft saw that Baldur's Gate 3 had 800,000 concurrent players on Steam and someone very, very high up in the company said "we need this game on our system while it's still relevant".

I'd also assume that Microsoft and Larian are going to try to patch this functionality back into the Series S. They may or may not succeed on that, we may never hear about it again if they don't succeed, but I bet they'll try.

The floodgates are open, IMO. Microsoft already made one exception without saying something like, "It must be added later." Other companies are going to come to Microsoft and say, "You let them put their game out without feature parity, we just want to remove X, Y & Z."

@ginormous76: I guess the thing here is to ask how different this process is to developers needing to make accommodations for minimum spec PCs, which is something EGS, GOG, and Steam mandate.

Been waiting on this news, finally time to buy a current gen console