And how would you recommend they optimize a game so they can render it twice in split screen, when the S only has 10 Gb of RAM? Because that’s the issue here.
It’s obviously impossible for me to recommend specifics without seeing their code and data. But a lot can be done in 10 GiB with some effort and clever resource management. They might have to make fundamental changes to their engine if they didn’t plan for such constraints ahead of time, so maybe it won’t happen for this game. But what they learn through this experience could benefit their future work.
We get it, you’re a huge xbox fan and you’re disappointed it doesn’t have a release date. But let’s be clear here: this is 100% on Microsoft. Larian has made it clear they aren’t happy with the level of quality of the game on the S (believe specifically for split-screen) and they are holding out on a release date until solutions can be found. That is 100% their right, and you better believe if they released with a shitty performing S version there would be tons of articles, tweets, threads, etc moaning and calling them out on it (instead of the universal praise it is currently receiving). If Microsoft really wants the game on their console sooner they have options: They can help Larian get the S version running properly by providing developers/knowledge/tools/etc, or they could allow for games to have exceptions for certain game features on X vs S.
If anything, Larian have gone above and beyond what most other larger AAA companies put out: Cross-play, cross-save, DRM free, and a huge open-world full of enough options and branching paths to put basically every other RPG to shame. It’s clear they want to deliver a great game that has everything possible they can put in it to please their customers. And part of that is not putting out a crappy version of the game. If you don’t like it, maybe take it up with Microsoft; or wait patiently and see if they can’t optimize and get things figured out once they game releases on the other platforms and they can spend more time focusing on the xbox platform.
There’s two views I see here from a software engineering perspective: multi-targeting devices with different specs can get really hard, and that modern development consumes resources in excess.
View 1: If you design a device that won’t catch up to modern expectations (limited, shared memory being the factor here), don’t expect to run all of the games. Some (or most) games will demand a certain level of resources. Microsoft either expected their status to swing their will upon the developers or were willing to help but just flopped on predicting what would be needed over the device lifetime. It’s a hard job, balancing developer need and cost. The hardware developers did their best. This comes down to
View 2: It’s an old coot viewpoint, but goddamn are modern computer programs are bloated pieces of mess. This is NOT an insult to the game developers, but it is to the OS and the engine developers as a whole. The entire programming industry has assumed that bigger more betterer computer always gonna come in a year or so. So now we have gigabytes of unused HQ textures in game downloads for no reason. Windows OS with Chrome takes gigabytes of RAM to display a webpage. We went from ultra strict data streaming to CPU rates for Crash Bandicoot to an NVME SSD shoveling half a terabyte a second when you want it in the Xbox Series X. This has left those who cannot afford strong PCs (note: most of the third world) and now consoles from playing the latest and greatest games. Developers leave them behind by grasping at the end of Moore’s Law. If BattleBit can produce good gameplay with 256 players on a raw potato, AAA game engines should try and appeal to everyone now.
They can help Larian get the S version running properly by providing developers/knowledge/tools/etc
Iirc, Microsoft is actually trying to help them get it running on S. I wish I could remember where I heard that, but I’ve been reading and watching too much on the game recently to find it.
Mate, you’re not John Carmack. It would be a ridiculous assumption to think their developers didn’t take a serious look into optimisation before deciding to ignore the xbox ecosystem for initial launch.
To be fair fully maxed out settings on PC It’s only using ~4GB for me? I was surprised but that seems to be how it is. I have 32GB and was using roughly half overall on the machine so plenty available.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t just release both Xbox versions without split screen and then try to patch it in later. That way they’d satisfy the feature parity requirement (as I understand it) and people could at least play the game. I love that they’re still doing split screen despite it seemingly having fallen out of favour these days, but it’s hardly an essential feature.
True, but I feel like not releasing the game at all is even worse. The consensus seems to be that PS5 already has better exclusives and now you can’t even play one of this year’s best third party games on Xbox.
At least this way they can blame it on the S instead of just being the ganked version.
I remember when Mortal Kombat came out censored on the SNES and uncensored on the Genesis, not a technical limitation, but a policy limitation. Not a good look.
And “just being the ganked version” in this case would mean not having a single feature that the vast majority of players likely wouldn’t even have used in the first place. Yes, it’s not good, but the choice here is between either locking your players out of that one non-essential feature or locking them out of the entire game. And the second option is, to me, very obviously much worse.
And it’s also not like it would be the “bad” version forever. They can just patch it in when they get it to work. And let players decide for themselves whether they want to get the game now without split screen or wait.
They COULD blame it on the S, but, again, Microsoft won’t allow it.
I don’t get how blaming the S for a delayed feature would be different than blaming the S for a delayed game, which is what they’re doing right now.
But I definitely agree that this is bad for Microsoft and they should do something about it. Not sure whether dropping the S would be the right call but they definitely need to reconsider the feature parity requirement policy.
The S was just a bad idea from the get go. The Xbox One X introduced 4K gaming, 4K televisions are dirt cheap and the defacto standard now, why bother doing an under-powered 1440p machine? Even if you wanted a cheaper option, it doesn’t make sense coming out with a machine that belongs in the last generation, not the current one.
They should have gone the Sony route… Series X, Digital Series X. $499/$399.
If they wanted a $299 box, keep the One X alive for 1-2 more years then kill it. Still a better choice than the Series S.
Yeah for sure. I agree that pushing the One X as the cheaper/entry level version would have been much better. Even for much longer than 1-2 years. People wouldn’t get as mad if they gradually started to phase it out and stopped releasing the high profile games on it after a few years while still supporting it somewhat. Even the feature parity thing wouldn’t have been that much of an issue if they’d just clearly communicated an expiry date beforehand.
As far as I can tell the article only talks about a feature parity requirement between the Xbox Series S and Series X versions. And that could be met by just dropping the feature from both versions.
They may or may not have the requirement anymore, but they definitely used to have this parity clause as well. Then if it came to other platforms first and Xbox later, the Xbox version had to have bonus content beyond the original release.
I also thought they might have such a requirement but I was unable to find a source that confirms (or even mentions) it. Definitely still possible though.
they are not allowed to have one good version and a crippled version. they absolutely are legally allowed to just cripple both. “but the ps5 will have split screen!” well then, sucks to be you if you bought an xbox. think microsoft for that, sony consoles have nothing to do with it. or microsoft could just admit to themselves that expecting a next-gen game to run equally well on literally-worse-than-last-gen hardware is just a pipe dream.
It’s hard to communicate it to the consumer. Far from everybody follows this discourse surrounding the game. Maybe someone buys BG3 just for the split screen capability, just to disappointingly find out that the Xbox version doesn’t support it. Especially when they already have paid full price for the game.
That’s a good point, but I feel like there are reasonable solutions for that like a disclaimer when buying the game digitally. For the physical version they could either put a sticker on it or just delay the physical version only. I also think that people who are informed enough to know about specific features like that are more likely to hear about this discourse.
Wait, there’s a split screen on Baldur’s Gate III? Normally I’d expect split screen games are for games with shorter gameplay loop, e.g. FPS, racing.
It’s kinda interesting that there’s a split screen couch co-op for a long sprawling RPG. Also doesn’t that make all the UIs and texts even more busy / cramped?
I just read that some people are trying out split screen. on steam deck, that’s wild.
Yeah, from what I understand Microsoft demanded 2 player co op splitscreen on one Xbox, which the ps5 can’t do either. The whole splitting the party up would be impossible and I bet they’d have to enforce close close proximity between pc characters to only render one environment at a time if they somehow pull it off going forward, and even then multi-zone on on xbox? which I think is unlikely as my 3 year old top end gaming rig barely gets 60 fps 2k ultrawide.
Anyone have any idea why Microsoft was so adamant about this?
Or is all that just bs and the Xbox can’t push it? All the peeps talking about the steam deck pushing it. Yes, but few are mentioning the settings @1280x720@30 fps all settings on minimum.
The problem with Xbox is that Larian couldn’t manage to make it work on Series S due to memory constraints. It takes a huge toll on memory if you allow two characters be on two parts of the map at the same time.
Microsoft wants Series S to be a cheaper 1080p option of Series X. Any game Series X can play should Series S also play with lower visual fidelity. This turns out to be a flawed dream by the looks of it.
I don’t think Microsoft will abandon this cheap 1080p console vision just because of one game, but they might need to if more games start to drop Xbox support due to this.
MS probably wants to make sure that Series S doesn’t end up missing out on games or getting subpar experiences, given they promised their customers that it’s the same as an X just at a lower resolution. You can see how they want to avoid outcomes like Series S being confined to lower player counts, smaller maps, or other game-restricting features.
But they’ve painted themselves into a corner in this case. Split screen requires rendering the whole game twice, which the S isn’t powerful enough to do. It’s also probably a feature few players will actually use.
Seems like this case should be an exception to the parity requirements.
Larian already did excellent split screen in D:OS2 (Maybe also in other games, no idea). The controller UI is very different from the M+K one and split screen is only available with controller input.
Okay so after seeing the bot TLDR and the other comments, I actually went and read the article. It’s a bit wishy washy as to why and mentions RAM could be the issue for S consoles.
When I read the headline I thought it meant it was also not viable for PCs either, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Most PCs have at least 16GB ram these days.
Why are people upset at all? I don’t get it. I actually think this is good, it will either force Microsoft to change their policy with consoles and/or release a line that can compete with PS. Or else. Meanwhile PC is still an option.
It’s been a while since I did Xbox memory mapping (One X) but IIRC there is approx 2GB of ram withheld by the system, and then an additional one or two can be recalled by the system for the purposes of running things like background downloads, party chat, video chat. That means that when your game goes to cert it’s checked to be performant under max OS load; so 6GB. This causes lots of issues (and is a pain as even MS’s analytics indicated this was a use case that appeared almost never. From what I have heard since, these TCRs/XRs/FTCs having changed much.
When I read the headline I thought it meant it was also not viable for PCs either, which doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Most PCs have at least 16GB ram these days.
Also keep in mind that PC doesn’t have unified memory. So there’s usually at least 8GB of VRAM in addition to whatever amount of main memory you have.
I don’t think anyone is upset? Xbox players are of course disappointed because they want the game but Larian have been totally fair and upfront about everything.
Microsoft should really re-evaluate their policies here though I agree. I feel like split screen could be an exception to the rule specifically.
I’ve played this game a bit and I really don’t understand why it can’t be scaled down visually to work. It’s not some game that needs to target high fps or something.
if you have X amount of work to do, you can’t just “add optimization” and somehow you’ll have less work to do.
if a game needs all the resources, then a well optimized game would still require all resources. but the unoptimized one would just not run properly.
optimized means “it uses the hardware efficiently”. bg3 is a very well optimized game. it uses the hardware efficiently, and it uses all of the hardware. at a particular point, the only optimization left to do, is to do less work, i.e. to cut content.
optimization isn’t some magic sauce you add to computer code to make it run faster. optimization is about writing good, performant code. at some point it’s going to get as good as it can get.
the reason it needs higher specs than previous games is that it is doing a lot more than previous games. there is more work to do. what you’re saying is akin to “this tiny car can do 100mph. why doesn’t mine also do 100 mph when i stuff it full of bricks and give it a smaller engine?” well, it’s because it has a lot more weight to carry, and less engine to do it with
The GPU of the series S is simply a lot worse, socutting quality by a bit won’t cut it. I also suspect that since they always quote the split screen as problem, it might be about the number of textures to be loaded in when the game is kind of running twice, not the quality.
Why would you load a texture twice in memory? Especially if it’s for the exact same object? It only needs to be rendered twice the texture stays the same and therefore only need to be stored once in ram…
He didn’t say load a texture twice, he said twice the textures - which is a worst case scenario, but you could get if the players aren’t near to each other.
I really wish people would read articles before commenting. I went looking for an article like this specifically that talks about the issues involved and folks can’t even be bothered to read beyond the headline. 😞
Because you’re focused on the visuals from a single user perspective…
There’s the world state and game logic to consider as well, and this would be relevant even in a 2D sprite based game.
The article makes it clear that it’s the couch co-op split screen that is causing the most headaches, with whatever additional overhead there is in maintaining another active character and rendering of the world on screen.
because split screen requires rendering stuff twice. and also needing to keep more stuff in memory simultaneously, depending on what two players might have in their field of view, instead of just one.
also, reducing the (subjective) quality by half, does not necessarily mean that you are now using half the resources. And also your game would look like shit compared to its contemporaries
I’ve been debating which console I might want to get for awhile now and this may have been the final straw pushing me towards the PS5. Haven’t been this excited about this game in a long time and there are several other exclusives that look amazing too.
I’ve been an Xbox Guy™ since the 360 launched, but I have a PS5 this generation. I don’t want to shill it too hard but the exclusives are great, I’m glad I switched.
I mean the whole point that xboxers were making when the ps5 was released was ‘but gamepass!’. Now that ps also has their ‘game subscription’, I do not really see the appeal of an xbox, especially if you also own a pc. PS has exclusives, xbox does not - at least not ones I’d be interested in and couldn’t play on PC.
I have zero nostalgia for Quake (i was 5 when it came out lol), but i wonder how this will do! Quake Champions didn’t seem to light the world on fire, but i wonder if the multiplayer scene here will blow up.
I was basically in the same boat. I didn’t have a PC powerful enough to run Quake 2 well at the time. I could do Quake 1, and played the hell out of it, but Q2 was a complete slideshow. By the time I was able to upgrade it was Half-Life days, so Q2 multiplayer will always be a missing chunk of PC FPS history for me.
Quake itself was ok. The multiplayer version was fun. But the real fun started when people began modding the game. The original Team Fortress was actually a free mod for Quake which I'm pretty sure quickly became the most popular instance of the game for online play.
Funny random tidbit, I actually remember playing the game with one dude who specifically had to brag about having a high powered 1ghz processor as his username in the game (something like 1gigahertz or something cheesy like that). Pretty sure back then I was still rocking a 700mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor.
The mods were fantastic. One that always sticks in my mind was Quake Rally. I think you controlled a car and drove it through the standard levels or some new maps, I can’t remember, it’s been so long.
It’s using Nightdive’s proprietary Kex engine that they made for remastering old games, so sadly no. The original Quake 2 engine (and all of idTech’s engines up to 4) remain open source though.
I was a bit disappointed by Quake II RTX, which felt like an engine hack with nothing more. This looks like the proper remaster we’ve been waiting for.
Love the inclusion of the Nintendo 64 port, like how it was also included with the Quake I remaster.
Screencheat is a fps game that supports 8 player split screen, but I think that is just about it. Is a hassel to set up 8 controllers as xinput only supports 4 and rest will have to be in directinput mode so anyting with more than 4 players is rare.
I haven’t played games in a loooong time, and this might get me figuring out how I can play it on my spare (and old!) linux laptopS I have a switch but I want to play it on a proper PC, just as I did when I was a kid.
The remaster has much higher hardware requirements than the original game. At least based on the official specs, it needs a basic gaming PC. You may have to use something like Yamagi to get it to run on your laptop.
That’s the game I first used this name in online multiplayer. Was weirded out when I started seeing Orbitz travel popups (I was thinking of that drink, hadn’t heard of the travel site). Don’t recall much of the game other than for the time it looked quite clean, shiny and well lit compared to the original Quake. Though I don’t think I even finished the single player so I may have missed out on later atmosphere.
I can’t wait to play this! Quake II and Quake III Arena are my all time favourite games. God they were just so cool when they came out. Quake II especially was light years beyond anything else out at the time. And they were FAST too!
Can anyone speak on the state of this game? I’ve never been that curious about it but with all the additions of cult classic characters, I’m starting to get intrigued
engadget.com
Aktywne