>No split screen on XSS
This sets a precedent, and is most likely the start of XSS falling into irrelevancy. Games a year or two from now will start being developed with limited features for the XSS.
Hope you got the XSX instead.
Baldurs Gate III coming to Xbox Series in 2023
that means the xbox really can't handle a decent framerate displaying 2 seperate screens in bg3 and that what probably caused the delay to get it to work to begin with
4, not 2. It runs out of ram.
just download more
split screen is only 2 player
Are the two splitscreens essentially two verions of the same world running concurrently? So basically two versions of the game running at once.
No, but it is multiple cameras running at the same time, so there are more things to render
Anon the biggest game of the decade is coming out in two weeks exclusively on the Series XS
>fallout 4 in space
>the best xbox will ever get
lol
This is Bethesda we’re talking about. They are one of the worst developers. I won’t even entertain the possibility of purchasing their shit ever again. Calling it Fallout 4 in space is completely expected.
Purchasing? It’s free on gamepass
Uhh bro? It's on PC where it plays at 60 FPS instead of 30.
>30 fps 720p
>biggest game of the decade
only if you're an xbox homosexual because its the first video game you losers got in 10 years
>This sets a precedent
pretty sure the game only being 50% complete sets a precedent you moronic Black person
BG3 is hardly the first unfinished game to be released this generation.
>STILL seething and making up false narratives
Holy shit, you people are setting new records for most mentally broken daily. Pathetic.
The game is fully complete for paladinchads
Evilcucks deserve not getting a finished game.
moronic memespouter. On a good playthrough you still miss out on Karlach's final quest among lots of other stuff and I am not referring to changes like the Emperor instead of the seductive little Tadpole(which would have still been kino together instead, one trying to seduce you, one manipulating you in a less evil manner and you also having the option to try to find a way to free Orpheus instead to rid yourself of both of them).
Fricking finally. So tired of the Series S gimping Xbox Series X despite what Microsoft if saying. Maybe finally we will get a game that use 100% Serie X hardware and not only shitty indie games.
>Series S is holding the X back
Call me when there will be one Xbox game which looks even remotely like snoyslop from the PS4 and we will talk.
Mate I'm with you here, wishing the same
Though, I hope it's not cinematic garbage ala God of War
Just a reminder, this is Microsoft essentially abandoning the Series S, which for years now developers have said is so bad it holds this generation back. But at the same time, the Series S makes up for about half of all Xbox sales.
How did Microsoft frick up this badly? They're going to throw half their userbase under a bus because they cheaped out on hardware and then imposed stupid restrictions on game developers.
>How did Microsoft frick up this badly?
It's what they're best at doing
It's like they're doing it on purpose. They lost last generation because of frick ups, and they've lost this generation to even bigger frick ups. I'm honestly surprised Phil Spencer even has a job right now.
They wanted the replicate the offering from the previous gen (Xbox One S and Xbox One X) right from the start. A cheap, disc less GamePass machine, and a powerhouse.
But it's not just a discless game pass machine, it's an objectively inferior piece of hardware which until now Microsoft have required all Xbox games work on.
Did no one at Microsoft realize this might result in games just not getting released on the Xbox?
And it's too late to fix the problem now. Half their userbase uses one of these pieces of shit and telling them "well you probably wont be getting games anymore" is not going to win them any fans.
>one game won't have split screen
>abandoning
Zoomer moment.
Until now all games on Xbox required feature parity. This means it had to be the same game on the Series X and S. This is obviously no longer the case.
This means if a developer can't get a game working on the Series S, they can simply gimp it now, or probably just skip the Series S entirely.
If you don't understand what this means, you're probably a moron.
Good that’s their own fault for not doing research on consoles. A gamer with a PS5 or Xbox series x shouldn’t be punished cause Xbox released a shitty system
And now everyone who bought a Series S will be punished. Which is over half of all Xbox owners.
Well they should’ve done research that their console was underpowered and bought the PS5 disk less version
Microsoft literally told people the Series S was fine though and it would play all games that came to the Xbox just at a lower resolution and limited to 60 FPS.
>just at a lower resolution and limited to 60 FPS.
And that was the case until now. 30fps for some games, but still, their word at least was true for more or less the first half of the generation.
This is the first time a game does not have feature parity with the X version. We're effectively entering the second phase of this generation, alongside the rumor the "Pro" consoles will be released in 2024 or 2025.
Just yesterday Phil said no pro version and that the Series S hardware is fine and developers should just stop complaining and deal with it.
Then today Microsoft themselves admit, actually the hardware isn't fine because even Microsofts best and brightest couldn't get BG3 split screen to work on the Series S (yes, Microsoft actually sent developers to try and get it working, and failed).
If Sony releases a Pro, Microsoft can't simply not do it as well.
You can be 100% sure an Xbox Series Z will be announced announced and released within a year or two.
>even Microsofts best and brightest couldn't get BG3 split screen to work on the Series S (yes, Microsoft actually sent developers to try and get it working, and failed).
No surprise pajeet and his spaghetti code squad couldn't get it working, they were probably less effective than larian themselves.
No, the problem is that Baldurs Gate 3 was never designed to work on hardware as weak as the Series S. You simply cannot optimize your way out of this. It'd be like saying if you optimized it enough, you could get Starfield to run on a PS1. You can't and never will be able to because Starfield was never designed to run on hardware that dated.
>or probably just skip the Series S entirely.
You are the moron thinking a dev can skip the Series S from now on.
It's more likely a special case because the game is getting 10/10s everywhere and Phil can say Xbox has both BG3 and Starfield unlike Sony.
>or probably just skip the Series S entirely.
Considering about half the sales for Xbox were Series S this gen, no dev would consider skipping it. If anything, they'd just skip Xbox to save themselves the work the S requires, considering it's looking to be gen 8 electric boogaloo as far as market share goes.
It's just not good for Xbox in general. Microsoft better get serious with exclusives now that they splurged on Activision.
>If anything, they'd just skip Xbox to save themselves the work the S requires
This is the big problem for microsoft if it actually happens. Kind of wonder if their studio buying spree wasn't a way to sort of alleviate that as much as possible.
I think the buying spree came from the realization they wasted the entire One gen and the beginning of the Series gen. Everyone expected them to get their shit together for the Series launch after leaving the One in the dust but they couldn't even launch it with one game. They tried to make a Sony like studio but couldn't. They lost multiplat games left and right because of the small marketshare. Series S didn't sell much, because of the long legs of the previous gen poorgays didn't buy a new console at all. They needed some leverage and controlling most major FPS and WRPG titles with an already running studio structure was really their only chance.
The main issue with the buyouts is as I said they wasted almost ten years. By 2015 it became obvious the PS4 will obliterate them and instead of building capacity they essentially ran the One with Gears (Coalition), Forza (Playground/Turn10), Sea of Thieves (Rare) and Halo (343). That is fricking it. That was their whole output. Even for the Series start they thought this is fine. And now when everyone inside and outside the Xbox community lost their shit completely they even dropped bangers like Infinite and Redfall. Now they bought a bunch of studios (ABK still not finalized for gods sake) and these studios need at least 4 or 5 years to put something out on a normal pace. The wasted time adds up exponentially but people lost patience and rightfully so. It is a huge gamble if Starfield and the upcoming games will at least hit okay or great status at all and MS can't make a mistake if they ever want to have another gen. I know this was said many times and they failed but they can't anymore. This gen is already lost for them, they need to try to keep at least of the small marketshare of the prevgen.
Xbox buying companies out hasn't really been working out for them because all the products are coming out subpar. Stanfield might be the first time they have a hit, but it's Bethesda and those games require time for people to come to a conclusion about how they really feel about the game.
Can't wait to see how they mangle Sega's corpse after Hyenas flopping makes them Join The Ack.
Microsoft would manage Sega's IPs better. Phantasy Star and Total War deserves way better than CA and Sega's Gacha Mobile Studio.
No Microsoft would just force all Sega games (especially Atlus) to be like Hyenas.
>No Microsoft would just force all Sega games (especially Atlus) to be like Hyenas.
>snoy pretending that microsoft is doing to sega what sega and sony have been doing to themselves
This is the protagonist and plot of Persona 6 after MS takes in Atlus.
I can see the protagonist being a MtF who becomes a woman in the Shadow world. Nips will still play if the cast is full of cute girls and sick animations.
Microsoft is hands off with their studios.
To a fault unfortunately. Redfall being the biggest example.
Yeah, and I think Microsoft is starting to realize that they cannot be hands-off. Redfall was a massive frick up.
They'll keep being hands off most likely. Just expect more random check-ins from Phil
>they cheaped out on hardware
You couldn't build a PC to compete with Series S for less than $1000. Digital Foundry made an entire video about this.
lmao who even wants to play this trash split screen lol
Over 30% of Original Sin 2 players on PC used split screen, and the number was higher on consoles.
Wot. Isn't splitscreen a console feature? Can you play "splitscreen" on two monitors?
Borderless window mode spanning two identical monitors worked for me
Microsoft unironically thought that Series S would pull in the Switch audience and sell Switch numbers
Man, i really would like to be present during one of their meetings. Just imagine a bunch of out of touch boomers trying to decrypt video game market trends and trying to think one step ahead while being 3 steps back.
>Microsoft essentially abandoning the Series S
they're putting out a 1tb version next week dingus
And who will buy it now they know that they will either get inferior versions of games, or just might not get certain games on it?
fortnite machine. Anyone who is not 12 years old will be buying either a full powered console or a gaming PC.
>fortnite machine
512GB is enough for Fortnite, FIFA, and maybe even the latest CoD installed at the same time. They don't need 1TB for that.
>and is most likely the start of XSS falling into irrelevancy
Unlikely, since Series S makes up the majority of xbox sales
>which for years now developers have said is so bad it holds this generation back
Developers are incompetent, more at 11
The average engineer at game companies doesn't know how to manage memory or parallel process their shaders for shit. The time of guys like John Carmack and other proper computer engineers being the backbone of the industry is over
You look at a game like Watch Dogs Legion, which fricking calculated weapon modifier effects with a huge chain of hand-coded if-else statements instead of something more lean or modular and it should tell you everything you need to know about modern software devs
>How did Microsoft frick up this badly?
They gave the average game studio's engineering team too much credit
>they cheaped out on hardware
They didn't, they offered a cheaper option for casuals and parents and normies. The issue is Larian REFUSED to just ship on both Xboxes without split screen. This is entirely a Larian-side frick up that they basically forced Xbox to bend the knee because of how popular their game is
Realize that Larian could have shipped BG3 on Xbox without splitscreen at all and they would have been fine. Hell, you'd probably not even realize it lacked splitscreen aside from a few reddit articles
>Developers are incompetent, more at 11
Microsofts own engineers who helped develop the console and who specialize in optimizing games to run on the Xbox could not get split screen in Baldurs Gate 3 to work on the Series S.
It is not developers, it is the hardware.
>Microsofts own engineers who helped develop the console and who specialize in optimizing games to run on the Xbox could not get split screen in Baldurs Gate 3 to work on the Series S.
No, they couldn't get it out THIS YEAR.
Let's be clear about what this is. Larian said they'd get an Xbox version out with MS help but that it probably wouldn't be out this year. The whole point of this concession isn't about whether it would be possible, it was about getting it out sooner rather than later. Phil panicked and didn't want to risk Xbox getting the game after it stopped being the new hotness and losing ground with FOTM players.
>It is not developers, it is the hardware.
I assure you, it's developers. If you look at the RAM usage of BG3, it's pretty huge on both the RAM and VRAM during normal play. That suggests that a shit ton of stuff is loaded in, even when the camera can't see it all. It unloads some things, like npc models or loot models when you're far away but that's pretty minimal.
There's literally tech for handling this sort of memory bloat that's been available for at least 5 years that I know isn't being used here. Shit like partial residency textures (the bedrock of tech like SFS) isn't really being used here. Neither is stuff like the Geometry engine on the Playstation.
The point is that aside from DLSS, most of the tech being in the Div4 Engine is stuff that could, on paper, run on the Switch (if not for a lack of horsepower or memory).
Like, if memory was my issue on Series S, I'd see if I could get SFS working and start segmenting the map textures so that shit that isn't being looked at isn't even loaded in
No, the fact of the matter is this. When you begin developing a game, you target a specific platform or level of hardware. Then you decide what features and technology the game will include so it will work on that platform/hardware.
The simple fact is, the Series S hardware was just too weak to get all of the features in Baldurs Gate 3 to work. So they had to remove features.
It has nothing to do with optimization. Somethings just cannot be optimized, nor is optimization a magic wand that makes everything just magically work. You could not optimize Baldurs Gate 3 to work on a Playstation 1, just like you could not optimize it to work on a Series S, because it was not designed to work on hardware that weak.
You're correct! You cannot optimize any game to work on any set of hardware
However:
>Series S GPU is as powerful TFLOPS-wise as the min-spec PC for BG3 (GTX 970)
>Uses NVMe SSD, more than fast enough for asset streaming
So to me, it sounds like it's just a memory pool issue on the asset textures during splitscreen that causes the issue.
My guess is Larian hasn't really used any of the more exotic or newer features around the newer GPU generations for handling this sort of issue. Hell, Baldur's Gate in Act 3 chugs at 1080p on an i7-12th gen intel CPU and RTX 4080, be it due to assets or to CPU load.
I wager that the Microsoft devs wanted Larian to start using Sampler Feedback sTreaming (pretty decent demo https://github.com/GameTechDev/SamplerFeedbackStreaming) to deal with memory limits but it would have taken too long to implement and the game wouldn't be out thi syear.
I assume there's a Make-Good on this concession: Larian can skip Splitscreen on Series S for 2023 but must have it out by some date in 2024 or risk a lawsuit or something
Too busy playing Starfield to care sbout this visual novel.
How hard can a splitscreen be?
Seeing as p2 doesn't have to stick with player 1. Pretty hard. I wandered off onto the other side of the map , fought some gnolls, looted there corpses, went in the menu took shit from p1 inventory because I was like I need that speak to the dead amulet I wanna talk to this corpse, all in act one while p1 was at camp talking to the twink.
Great this saves them from experiencing a game with cut content and rewritten story
> XSS
All I hear from developers is just how bad this platform is. The endless whining that it's too limited and they can't get their games to function properly on it.
So maybe the problem is that these developers are armless woke morons recruited by quotas, and not that the platform is bad?
Either society will change and start hiring adequate developers, or the gaming industry will die due to the dominance of woke rabble.
You need to understand Anon, the console exclusive FF16 runs in 720p on the PS5 because the Series S is holding it back.
Phil Spencer really is dumbass homosexual.
I have no idea what they were thinking with the Series S, Sony made a discless version of the PS5 that is exactly the same in every way except the lack of a disc tray, but Phil Spencer in his infinite wisdom decides to make the discless version of their "next gen" console a weak piece of shit that is barely any better than their last system, and struggled to play even flagship first party exclusives.
>I have no idea
I will never understand how people can not see further than their nose. They had to undercut the PS5 because the Xbox is so unappealing. There are 22 millions Series consoles sold, 12 millions of them is an S model. This means two things: the core Xbox userbase is so small in reality they couldn't even sell half of what Sony sold for "full" price. The Series S users wouldn't have bought an X.
If not for the S Xbox would have sold HALF of what they did so far and it would be even more irrelevant than now. The Series S is what actually enables the X to get games and the last of the worries of the brand. Sony and Nintendo put out better looking games on weaker systems. This is 100% of management issue still. The people who are actually crying about the Series S are not the Series S users but the "big" console owners who think the reason Jedi Survivor runs in 864p never 60fps on their ""4K""" console is the S.
MS must be worried Starfield is going to get it brains beat in next week by BG3 to basically kill the XS
The xbox naming scheme is moronic. Which xbox is the newest one?
No meme they should have just kept going by 360s 720s 1080s etc
Even had a nice ring to it, “you getting the 1080 ? “
Good I was sick of that piece of shit system holding back the game release, I guess Phil couldn't ignore the backlash.
Unironically good news. Frick the splitscreen. Shouldn’t have been there at all, people don’t play CRPGs for the multiplayer, that’s what the TTRPGs are for lmaoo
How does a crpg work with a controller? There aren't enough buttons and battles will be even slower
Its turn based so why would you need more buttons? And they already ported bg1/2, planescape, icewindale 1, poe 1/2 to every console so I don’t personally know but it works well enough im assuming
same way it works on steam deck.
It works really good actually you can run around with the left stick and rotate the camera and zoom in/out with the right stick it's less annoying than keyboard and mouse in that aspect.
Snoys have had a hard time lately huh?
the whole xbox parity clause was dumb and im amazed it took baldurs gate 3 becoming a PS5 console exclusive for microsoft to panic rollback that shit.
They wouldn't have if BG3 wasn't the absurd and completely unexpected massive success it turned out to be.
You got to remember, at the beginning of this generation they also required all games work on the Xbox one. Microsoft have no fricking clue what they're doing. Sony are winning this generation purely by virtue of existing.
> It's over for SeS chads... They won't be able to play the newest troony goyslop with the split screen, Microsoft would never recover!
lmfao
Thanks for beta testing, PC gamers! I can't wait to play the fully patched version! Here's to hoping the patches remove a lot of the insane amount of homosexual stuff in the game.
We all knew Phil was full of shit when he said the only difference between SKUs would be framerate and resolution.
>BG3 is a massive success and a serious GotY contender
>splitscreen is a feature no one cares about so cutting it is no real loss
This was the smart move. MS isn't going to give another pass to just any game.
>splitscreen is a feature no one cares about
Over 30% of Origin Sin 2 players played in split screen on PC, and the number was higher on consoles. 1/3rd of the player base isn't "no one".
>Over 30% of Origin Sin 2 players played in split screen on PC, and the number was higher on consoles. 1/3rd of the player base isn't "no one".
Funny how they were comfortable omitting it from the Switch release but refused to do so for xbox
>the whole xbox parity clause was dumb
It would undermine the value of the Series S and its sales potential if there was no guarantee of feature parity. And then Xbox would have literally no opportunity to earn back any market-share against playstation
it sets a dangerous precedent. devs can just cut out features out of a game for series s. phil promised that series s would just be resolution+framerate differences. now we're cutting out gameplay content. all it highlights is that series s should have never happened. its just a last gen console with drm updated to play the new games.
In a year or twos time every Xbox game is going to have a warning on it saying something like "Xbox Series X only" or "No Multiplayer on Series S" and so on and so on.
You are forgetting there was (and still is) a chip shortage that meant for a good 2 years only the Series S was really something you could buy unless you wanted to pay a scalper 200-300% of the original price for a Series X. Over half of all Xbox owners got a Series S.
>devs can just cut out features out of a game for series s
like what? what features are as demanding as splitscreen?
pso2 ngs runs shitty on series s and xbox one and sega can one day decide to drop those and only run it on xbox series x if they decide to push a big update that utilizes ps5/pc hardware.
>only run it on xbox series x
Unlikely, I doubt MS would make an exception for them
sega and microsoft are basically butt buddies going back to dreamcast
https://www.sega.co.jp/en/release/211101_1.html
>This sets a precedent, and is most likely the start of XSS falling into irrelevancy.
yes, it was the right decision. the local split screen is a feature not likely to be in a lot of next gen games.
The only take i get from this is that microsoft still can't get their shit together.
why would a modren game have split screen to begin with? waste of manpower.
Microsoft had to cave because BG3 is one of the biggest games of this year. And they were in danger of missing out on it because of the Series S.
Smart business move.
But this opens up pandora's box for future games that run like ass on the Series S.
honestly cooperative play sucks in BG3. I dunno why, it just feels weird compared to DivOS1 or 2.