Baldur’s Gate 3 is coming to Xbox this year, but no split-screen co-op for Series S

Larian founder and CEO Swen Vincke has shared an update on its massive RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 coming to Xbox. While Baldur’s Gate 3 is now looking set to debut on Xbox Series consoles this year, it won’t have split-screen co-op for the Series S version.

Vincke announced that, after meeting with Xbox head Phil Spencer, the team found a “solution” to bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox players.

“All improvements will be there, with split-screen coop on Series X,” said Vincke. “Series S will not feature split-screen coop, but will also include cross-save progression between Steam and Xbox Series.”

Split vision

While no split-screen co-op will disappoint Series S owners, Vincke stated back in June that split-screen would be one of the potential hangups for the Xbox version. He mentioned compromises might need to be made for an Xbox version, and it looks like lack of split-screen on Series S is going to be among them. Microsoft typically requires feature parity between Xbox Series games, but for now this is one bullet point that will stay on Series X. 

In an interview with IGN earlier this week, Spencer had commented on the Baldur’s Gate 3 situation. “The decision to do split-screen or not is a creative decision, a dev decision,” Spencer said. “So if we think about Forza, it has nothing to do with any kind of hardware thing on S and X, just where they wanted to focus their time.” Vincke had previously confirmed to IGN that Xbox had committed some help to Larian in getting BG3 up to scratch on its consoles.

Next up for Baldur’s Gate 3 is the PlayStation 5 version. Larian will bring the game to Sony’s console on September 6, following an earlier delay.