I will continue to play the good F2P games (without paying a cent myself) and the great AAA games that I will gladly pay full price for.
I figure if the F2P are going to be funded by others anyway, I might as well benefit from it.
I’ll also signal to the devs that make great full featured games that this is what I want.
Let’s say that’s something Microsoft would even allow, it diminishes the ability to compete with the PS5. Why would I get a Series X if there’s a chance that some big game launches will have less features than other current gen platforms?
Microsoft really hamstrung this generation of consoles by releasing the S and demanding it runs feature parity with the X.
Hey guys, you should get a Series X because BG3 is coming out. Sure it will be missing features that you’ll get on the PS5 like split screen, but you guys understand we need to support the Series S and have parity between our two consoles.
So even though you spent more money on a Series X, that’s capable of running the full game that the PS5 is getting, you should just be happy that you’re getting the game at all. Don’t worry about having paid for a console that’s capable of more.
Your comment makes zero sense. The decision not to release on Xbox at all is not Microsoft’s. It’s Larian who rather sacrifice an entire hardware base for a niche feature. You obviously didn’t read the article. It’s spelled out there.
While there would be some variance in technical capabilities between consoles, feature parity between the two would remain the same. It would remain the same because Microsoft would demand it remain the same, from both its own studios and third parties.
Wow, I’m amazed on how bad you’re at grasping the basics of what I wrote.
I 👏 DID 👏 NOT 👏 WRITE 👏 ABOUT 👏 CUTTING 👏 SPLIT SCREEN 👏 FROM 👏 SERIES S 👏 ONLY 👏 BUT 👏 ALL 👏 XBOX 👏 VARIANTS 👏 SO 👏 THE 👏 GAME 👏 CAN 👏 LAUNCH 👏 AND 👏 NOT 👏 LEAVE 👏 XBOX 👏 USERS 👏 IN 👏 THE 👏 RAIN!
The article is about feature parity between Series S and Series X and not about how all Xbox variants can’t have feature disparity with PlayStation. If Larian were to cut split screen for all Xbox versions, the game could launch just fine.
Where did Microsoft or Larian say that was an option? Where did Microsoft say that they would be happy to have features cut from the X to keep parity with the S?
I pointed out how poor a business decision this would be if Microsoft would allow it. It ruins their offering for the Series X. How can it compete with the PS5 if they start allowing developers to drop features from Xbox games? The entire point of the article is that Microsoft has boxed themselves into this corner. And your suggestion isn’t a good solution.
Where did Microsoft or Larian say that was an option?
That is an option because exclusive features come to one brand all the time. Everyone with even minor insight in video game business knows that.
Where did Microsoft say that they would be happy to have features cut from the X to keep parity with the S?
It’s not about happiness, it’s about what the rules allow and since there are exclusive features on other consoles all the time, it’s obviously allowed. That’s how the Spider-Man character ended up being exclusive on the PlayStation version of Marvel’s Avengers. Golden Eye 007 has online multiplayer exclusive to Nintendo Switch. Those are well-known facts and if you don’t know them: That’s on you.
I pointed out how poor a business decision this would be if Microsoft would allow it. It ruins their offering for the Series X. How can it compete with the PS5 if they start allowing developers to drop features from Xbox games?
Yeah, you’re such a great business genius, you think not launching a game at all is better than cutting a niche feature barely anyone cares about. Yes, you totally convinced me.
I guess you gonna vote me down again because you cannot stomach that I’m right and you’re wrong.
I think you are misreading, they are refusing to launch because of the feature parity but, that’s because they are consciously deciding that split screen is a hard requirement for the game to launch, whereas with other consoles(steam deck) they just removed split screen and called it good.
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.
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.
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.
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 think hogwarts sold so well because of the JK backlash. Brought a lot of attention to the game. It was a good game though. Baldurs is getting attention because of how good it is. And treating your customers with respect goes a long way. I just bought DOS 1 & 2 because of how much I’m enjoying BG3 and wanted to vote with my wallet. Plus I hear they’re also really good.
I think Hogwarts sold well because it was a genuinely good game which captured the spirit of the franchise, a decent story line, an explorable world and had some decent combat mechanics.
I think the JKR boycott did help in an underhanded way because most of the protesting was shrill straw man character assassination. People tuned it out and bought the game anyway based on word of mouth. The real losers in this nonsense were gaming websites who undermined their own credibility by boycotting the game or scoring it badly just and turning the review into a diatribe about gender politics.
I’m finishing D:OS2 first with another party. Also Larian games are always better a couple months or so after release, so I don’t mind waiting. So no not the only one :)
I almost never buy a game on opening day for full price. But fuck microtransaction nonsense – as soon as the devs made an official statement about it, I was on board.
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
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.
And with PC, there is only one view point at one time. You can have characters all over the map, but it only needs to render one at a time. Worst case it loads and unloads assets as you switch back and forth. With split screen console, gotta have both loaded at the same time.
The Xbox Seried S does not have 10GB VRAM it has 10GB VRAM/RAM that can be dynamically allocated to whatever the game needs.
Baldur’s Gate 3 needs 12GB combined VRAM/RAM at minimum. While the Xbox OS peobably doesn’t eat as much RAM as Windows does the difference is apparently not 2GB which leaves the Series S with not eniugh RAM to power the game.
As others mentioned for the Steamdeck Splitscreen was disabled, however that was likely done to save GPU performance, unlike the Series S the Steamdeck has enough RAM (16GB) to meet the minimum requirements.
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.
Xbox series S have 8GB for game, so while BG3 might consume around 4-5GB on PC, console with unified memory couldn’t afford this. All the other assets(model/animation/audio clips/massive amount of icons) needs to be loaded as well. With split screen, you can have one person tries to go into conversation (that streaming in high res texture/face models, etc) while the other one stay and still render the world with all the things their camera can move around with.
I don’t know what to say other than maybe you should send Larian your resume and type “I am sure series S can be ported no issue, here is my numbers.” I am sure Larian would love to have simultaneous launch like PS5 and you can cut a really good deal if you can manage to pull that. BUT, you would have to pass the [Persuasion] check though, hope you have high cha to back it up. :)
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.
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.
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)
Xbox owners who are not following video game news every second of the day might find themselves buying a Series S version thinking they can play co-op with their friend who owns a Series X and they…can’t.
The problem here is implied to be local co-op between X and S players?
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”.
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’m not sure. I saw some one comment that they were running split screen on Windows, but I can’t personally verify that. Based on what I know of software development, it’s likely part of every version of it but not necessarily easily accessible. For example DoS2 has split screen coop on PC, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. You have to plug in 2 controllers and do some extra steps but it works.
Maybe if you plug in a second controller on steam deck you can?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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? 
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. 
Are you really not comprehending what I said? To re-iterate: the cost-to-returns ratio to spend man hours for certain features is not feasible because of how much time would need to be spent. This, at worst means some titles will simply not have feature X, and at average means the “worst first” development method means some games will just be worse, than they could have been, if it were merely X, PS5 and PC to consider.
I think we agree that MS bungled their approach and overestimated that cloud powered gaming would take off. But the reality of it is that S has become a thing that holds down game development, and like with BG3, gives sony pseudo exclusivity on consoles. It’s also likely what caused 343 to never ship couch-coop on Halo. It worked to some extent, but simply wasn’t worth the hours to finish for S.
Sooner or later MS has to tackle the issue somehow, and if I had to guess, they’ll rather push for a 0.5 gen jump instead of just screwing with people who bought S.
It’s easier to say a game is “newest gen optimized” than to backtrack on their promise.
If you are talking about something completely different, then no worries, carry on. This was merely my 2 cents on the topic.
I guess not and frankly I just don’t feel like speaking further with you given the completely needless hostility over what is likely just our talking at cross purposes. Have a good one.
I did not mean that in a hostile way. I asked because you kept replying to my comments, but disregarding their content while telling me to stop talking.
Based on the vote ratio, other people got the point just fine and didn’t feel like they needed to tell me to be silent or scroll back up.
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.
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?
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?
How is it any different than the number of games coming out that betray all the things they promised?
As a series S owner, I never expected this thing to be able to play modern AAA games for 7-10 years like previous gens. It’s delusional. It was $300 with a controller ffs lol
 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.
Some people can be pretty dogmatic about this stuff but yeah, I feel like it’s better than cash. Especially because the stuff I do for rewards gives them pretty useless data and I have all kinds of privacy stuff running in the background protecting my data
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.
What games have Sony bought exclusively too? I’ve seen them pay for development of several. Microsoft has taken away sequels from PlayStation in the past. That’s worse imo.
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.
As I said in another comment, I own a series S, and I think it’s pretty ridiculous of me to expect a $300 piece of hardware to be able to play the latest games past five years. Even with what they have said, I just kind of assumed it can’t be true. 
I imagine in two or three years I will switch to dev mode and boot retro arch on it. 
Right but you’re probably a little more clued up to this sort of stuff than the average consumer who’s seen the marketing and thought ‘oh lovely, I don’t need a disk drive’ in this thing.
Both my brothers own the S. It’s an incredible little machine, but imo they screwed the proverbial pooch when they pushed this as a 1080p alternative to the more powerful Series X.
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.
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Aktywne