But developers are starting to get frustrated, especially those who target cutting-edge tech or who are moving on to new engines, like Unreal Engine 5. For gamers on a budget, or those who haven’t upgraded to 4K screens yet, giving up some visual quality and even frame rate for a $200 savings might seem like a fair deal. (Microsoft has notably dropped split-screen modes from Halo Infinite co-op and the forthcoming Forza Motorsport.) This could well be the bottleneck for split-screen co-op in Baldur’s Gate 3, which is trying to present two viewpoints on a highly complex game simulation. It also has less memory, and narrower memory bandwidth. As it’s designed for 1440p or lower-resolution displays, this isn’t a huge problem - it’s pushing fewer than half as many pixels as the 4K-capable Series X - although it can struggle with frame rate, too, with some games running at 30 frames per second instead of 60 fps. The Xbox Series S has the same central processor as the Series X, but a much weaker graphics processor. Only now that games like Baldur’s Gate 3 are skipping those platforms does Series S effectively become the baseline hardware for all multiplatform releases. So far, there hasn’t been much evidence of this, not least because, until very recently, we’ve been in a cross-generation phase, with many titles still appearing on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Only now does Series S effectively become the baseline hardware for all multiplatform releasesĮver since the surprise announcement in 2020 that Microsoft would release a pair of game consoles this generation - one targeting 4K displays and fancy graphical features like ray tracing at $499, the other with fewer bells and whistles and less storage, but offering full “next-gen” compatibility for $200 less - there’s been a debate about whether the Series S would end up holding back the quality of Series X games, or indeed of all multiplatform releases in this generation. But the company had good reasons for sticking to that policy - perhaps even high-minded ones about keeping gaming affordable. To miss out on it because of a policy own-goal would be embarrassing, not to mention frustrating for Series X owners. Baldur’s Gate 3 was wowing critics, making huge waves on Steam, and quickly establishing itself as one of the biggest and best games of the year. If Larian could not get co-op working on Series S, it wouldn’t be able to release the game on Xbox at all. It also strongly prefers feature parity with the PlayStation versions of multiplatform releases, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has split-screen co-op on PS5. As Larian explained, Microsoft requires gameplay feature parity between Xbox Series X and Series S versions of games. Initially, it would not commit to releasing the game on Xbox before 2024, if at all, because it could not get the split-screen co-op mode working sufficiently well on Xbox Series S - the lower-cost, lower-power Xbox console of this generation. And it could have been much longer.īaldur’s Gate 3’s developer, Larian Studios, has no timed exclusive arrangement in place with Sony or anyone else. Baldur’s Gate 3 - which has already become an overnight sensation on PC, if you can say that about a game that spent three years in early access - is out now on PlayStation 5, but an Xbox version is still weeks or months away. Starfield was acquired by Microsoft along with its developer and publisher, Bethesda, in 2021, and was released on Xbox and Windows PC only. But only one of them is a console exclusive. This week, the two biggest role-playing games of the year were released in a head-to-head contest on rival console platforms.
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