Phil Spencer Insists Games Launch Across Xbox Series X and S Despite Baldur's Gate 3 No-Show - IGN (www.ign.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Xbox boss Phil Spencer has addressed the fact Baldur's Gate 3 launches on PS5 before Xbox Series X and S in an interview at gamescom 2023.

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[-] [email protected] 40 points 10 months ago

Do they have any other option than to stick to their guns on this one? That's sold the XBox Series S as having feature parity with the Series X. If they go against that now, then they've engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine, plus all the negative PR that comes from it.

They're stuck until the next console generation, which is a long way out. And I wonder if PS5 will continue to gain ground against XBox for the rest of the generation as a result.

It will be interesting to see if they continue with their two-model tiering next gen, but I'm guessing they won't.

[-] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago

I feel like developers have completely given up on optimizing games. Any game should be able to run on the SS. Most games can run on last gen consoles

[-] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

From what they've said the game can run fine, but the issue is getting local split screen on the S working because it has such a small amount of RAM available

[-] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Yep. The Series S gives games even less RAM than the One X did.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

Most of time, it's the juggle of time and resource available to you, but there is still a hard limit otherwise how about demand BG3 to also run on my antique knockoff NES? Cause they are too lazy to accommodate the hardware limitation? How about my smart watch? Or someone else's smart fridge?

Don't get me wrong, what you said in some cases but most likely the devs are told to push it out instead of make the game run better(on the target platforms.) There are no secret sauce to otherwise fit a game like BG3 to previous gen consoles.

Last, if you are really good at this optimization thing the whole industry will pay good money for your skill set.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

How about my smart watch? Or […] smart fridge?

Well it worked for Skyrim? They released that for my niece’s speak and spell.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Having just looked up the equivalent PC specs, it really doesn’t seem like a lot of power.

I imagine the game can run “fine”, but they probably need to do a fair bit of optimisation or people will complain about the way it looks and frame rate.

One of the benefits consoles used to have was everyone running the same hardware, but they’ve lost that now and I don’t imagine console players will be as accepting of lower quality as PC players with low end GPUs.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

The main issue, and what’s keeping Baldur’s Gate off it, is a RAM issue. It’s got less RAM that the One, and things like dual screen need more RAM than the S has.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

It's just a business decision. Enough players have strong enough hardware that the invest into optimizing for weaker hardware isn't likely to pay off.

If there is a weaker platform with lots of players, like the Switch, that can make optimizing financially viable, but obviously, it depends on how much optimizing you would have to do...

[-] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago

The Series S will become an ever bigger anchor going forward. Eventually, there will be 3rd party games that just choose not to bother with the Xbox at all because of the Series S.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

We’re only a few years into the new console generation and problems are also starting. It’s definitely going to get worse as more demanding games start coming out. Microsoft is really going to have to loosen their parity policy, or it’s going to hold either the entire generation back or them back.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Given that there's plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S they still need to scale their game for, I doubt it will be as big an issue as people make out. BG3 is an odd outlier as they've put a splitscreenode in the console game that the PC version doesn't have and that's what's holding things up.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Given that there’s plenty of PCs out there with lower spec than the S

Not when it comes to memory. The Xbox SS only has 10GB combined system memory and VRAM. The PC version of BG3 requires 8GB system memory plus 4GB of VRAM, so the SS is a couple gigabytes short in total.

Going by the Steam hardware survey, 95% of PCs have at least 8GB of system memory, with 16GB being easily the most common amount. 80% have at least 4GB of VRAM, with 8GB being the most common amount.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Apparently Microsoft wants games to run with only 6GB of shared memory in case there are too many background stuff taking up ram

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

That number is - well, let's just say, the correct value can be found in the docs here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/gdk/_content/gc/intro/whatsnew/archive/whats-new-2206

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

“Access to this topic requires membership in an NDA developer program”

So, uh, what’s the correct value, then?

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

What? The PC version has split screen.

How to Activate the Split Screen on PC in Baldur’s Gate 3

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I'm pretty sure split screen is supported on PC?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I didn't even see a local multiplayer option when I was playing on the deck?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

It’s available on PC, but not on Steam Deck.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

How did they manage that, the Deck doesn't usually get bespoke builds.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Valve lets you identify the deck. It's probably just a flag that hides the reference to it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Seems like!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It’s not a bespoke build; they just disabled the function on Steam Deck.

https://x.com/cromwelp/status/1685989272099213312?s=46&t=EUtgwMByNj4sQbVP9INV-Q

And for the record, you can run split screen on the Steam Deck; it’s just not supported.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

If they go against that now, then they’ve engaged in false advertising and will immediately get slapped with a huge lawsuit and/or fine,

No they won't. Companies aren't beholden to their commitments from advertisements in perpetuity. In the first place, someone would need to sue, or begin a class action. That'd drag out for years, and almost certainly lose.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Even without a lawsuit, is it worth the hassle?

They’d lose a lot of trust in case they ever wanted to do something similar in future.

I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I’d be furious with any company if they pulled that sort of shit with a product I owned.

On the other hand, feature parity means that the full potential of the X because everything also has to run on the S. So all the things that the X can do that the S can't will, probably, not be used much, if at all, going forward, just to avoid this kind of hassle.

Great deal for people who bought the S, but sucks shit for people who paid a couple hundred bucks more for the X, for features that simply won't be utilized.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

They can change course on advertised usage if they can argue that they had a genuine intention for longevity and only changed course after.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

They’re stuck until the next console generation

Since these Xbox consoles came out, maybe even since Xbox One X, they've been talking about being "beyond generations". I figured that would result in more periodic updates, probably with two simultaneous lines of Xboxes, X and S, but it hasn't turned out that way. So far, it's just seemed to mean that you don't have to deal with Sony's BS around PS4 and PS5 versions of the same game.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

They should've figured out a way to communicate that the Series S will last until next gen, but the Series X would get more cross-gen games when next gen launches

Or they should've known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could've included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol

But I'm actually a believer that BG3 could be made to run on XSS even with split screen, it's just gonna take more work and reduced graphics maybe audio quality too, and smarter data streaming from the SSD

[-] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Or they should’ve known that RAM is hard to scale on and they could’ve included an extra 2GB or so in the Series S lol

They really should have. It’s got 2Gb less than the One, which is where all these problems are coming from.

And as for getting BG3 running on the S, well, Microsoft has had to send out some of their engineers to help Larian figure out how to do it, so I doubt it’s going to be an easy job.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Wasn't the general idea that direct storage means data moves from the SDD to the GPU skipping RAM, hence the need for less. It's possible Larian aren't used to dealing with direct storage since the PC doesn't have it in most systems even now and so just brute forced things the old way on PS5? That's why MS engineers have to go and show them how to use the new architecture.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

On PC, the point is that you can skip RAM and go straight to VRAM. You still need the assets in memory while you use them. It's faster but it's not that much faster. With unified memory there isn't that distinction. That's one of the ways consoles can be better optimized than a general PC build.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

You know how the Sega Saturn had a four meg RAM cart? There's your solution! Sell a four GIG RAM cart for the Xbox Series S! Maybe it'd have a connector on the other end for storage cartridges. You know, make your own little tower of power.

(Honestly, I get the impression that after all this complaining, a Switch version of Baldur's Gate 3 will mysteriously materialize. So much for your talking point, Larian!)

[-] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I seem to recall Xbox making claims they wanted this console generation to be "the last" because they wanted to make frequent iterative upgrades instead. I feel like they changed to the opposite mentality now, if the lowest common denominator can't handle it, nobody gets to play.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Me when it launched: this is a terrible idea and will hold Xbox back

Xbox fans: nuh uhhhh! It's brilliant!

[-] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

Thing is, it could be a good idea if they didn’t have such strict parity rules - play the game, but not necessity with the exact same features (ie, disabling split screen, but still allowing co-op). Heck, that could even have been a selling point to get people to “upgrade” to an X.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023

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