Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox Release Date Coming In December

Oliver Brandt
·2 min read
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Baldur's Gate 3 party mountain promo screenshot

Baldur’s Gate 3 – the hit Dungeons & Dragons simulator game from Larian Studios – was released to critical acclaim on both PC and then PS5 earlier this year. Xbox owners weren’t so lucky, though, with Larian reporting some trouble getting the game working on the weaker Series S. It seems to have gotten through that, though, and we’ll finally be getting a release date next week.

Larian Studios announced in a tweet that Baldur’s Gate 3 is “on track” for a release in December, after months of issues getting the game running on the Xbox Series S. The game was first released on PC in August – where it was so popular it almost broke Steam – followed by a PS5 release on PS5 in September. For a while, though, it looked like an Xbox release might not happen at all.

That’s because, up until very recently, Xbox creator Microsoft reportedly mandated that any game released on Xbox Series X|S had to have feature parity across both the Series X and Series S. Larian was able to get Baldur’s Gate 3 working fine in single-player mode on Series S, but its split-screen co-op mode just wasn’t going to happen with acceptable performance.

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Pressure from fans and the allure of having one of the most successful games of the year on its platform led Microsoft to reconsider, and Larian announced that Baldur’s Gate 3 will release on Xbox after all. The company will release a version of the game with different features on the two consoles — Xbox Series X would have the same game as PS5, while Series S would just have the single player mode and no split-screen.

Larian says it’ll be announcing the actual release date for Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox Series X|S during The Game Awards on December 7, 2023. That’s not a huge surprise, all things considered — tens of millions of people tune in to The Game Awards each year, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is nominated for eight awards, tied for the most nominations alongside Alan Wake 2.