Baldur’s Gate 3’s Split-Screen Essential, Director Says, Xbox Version Won’t Release Without It

Larian Studios’ creative director Swen Vincke has said that split-screen co-op is “a must” for the Xbox Series S version of Baldur’s Gate 3 and doesn’t want to release the game without it.

Last month, Larian said that it’s currently working on bringing the upcoming role-playing game to Xbox Series X|S, but that the Xbox Series S is holding things back for now and it isn’t finished. A blog post shared more details, with the developer saying that “in order to announce and release the game on Xbox, we need to ensure that the game is performing without compromise across the entire Xbox X|S ecosystem, in multiplayer and with split-screen.”

Now, the studio’s creative director has offered more insight into the situation (via Eurogamer) explaining that bringing split-screen to the Xbox Series S version is “challenging” but he is “confident in the team. If it’s possible, they’ll make it happen. But it’s a very big game.”

“The team has been working hard on making it work, but they’re still working on it,” Vincke said. “And the problem with optimizations is you finish one thing and then a new one pops up. So here, we’re dealing with a situation where we just go through the motions.

“The team will manage because they managed to make [Divinity: Original Sin 2] run on the Switch–but it took time,” he added.

Vincke went on to explain that the issue right now is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is such a big game when taking into account the massive world and everything going on with party members–like spell-casting–that it’s “taxing” for performance and “requires memory.”

When asked if Larian would remove split-screen co-op from the Xbox Series S if the team can’t get it to run, he said, “Well if you talk about feature parities, split-screen is a must for us and we don’t want to release it without split-screen, so we wouldn’t want to do that.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 is set to launch on August 3 for PC and September 6 for PlayStation 5. During a recent panel, where Larian showed off more of the game, it was revealed that players will be able to romance a Druid in grizzly bear form.