Larian Studios will officially release its Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 — which has been playable in early access since 2020 — on Aug. 31, on MacOS, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. But a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t on the table yet for Xbox, the developer says, and it’s not for platform-exclusivity reasons.
Baldur’s Gate 3’s summertime release was revealed Thursday during Sony’s State of Play showcase. A latest trailer for the RPG introduced Baldur’s Gate fans to General Ketheric Thorm, a “seemingly invincible necromancer leading a military of the dead” who — bonus! — just happens to be voiced by the beloved and intimidating J.K. Simmons.
That trailer also highlighted two latest features for Baldur’s Gate 3: split-screen co-op play, enabling two players on one PlayStation 5 (or as much as 4 with online co-op); and controller support. The previous feature, Larian says, is partly why there’s no Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3… yet. After Larian creative director Swen Vincke took to Twitter to guarantee fans the studio wasn’t “playing the exclusivity game” with Xbox fans, the studio took to Reddit for an expanded explanation of what’s occurring.
Xbox players, we’ve seen your questions on if/when you possibly can expect Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox. We’ve had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 within the works for a while, but we now have run into some technical issues – particularly with split-screen co-op. We’re still working on an Xbox version of BG3, but we’re not yet confident enough to announce it. We don’t like announcing anything until we’re ready, because we don’t wish to get peoples hopes up until we’re sure we will deliver.
There’s no platform exclusivity stopping us from releasing BG3 on Xbox day and date, should that be a technical possibility. If and once we do announce further platforms, we wish to ensure that each version lives as much as our standards & expectations.
So, don’t surrender hope, Xbox fans. If Larian can get it working on Xbox Series X (and in addition Xbox Series S), you could be facing down necro J.K. Simmons by end of 12 months.