Baldur’s Gate 3 Hits PS5 And PC This Summer, But Not Xbox

Republished By Plato

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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 new trailer for the RPG introduced Baldur’s Gate fans to General Ketheric Thorm, a “seemingly invincible necromancer leading an army of the dead” who — bonus! — just happens to be voiced by the beloved and intimidating J.K. Simmons.

That trailer also highlighted two new features for Baldur’s Gate 3: split-screen co-op play, enabling two players on one PlayStation 5 (or up to four with online co-op); and controller support. The former 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 assure fans the studio wasn’t “playing the exclusivity game” with Xbox fans, the studio took to Reddit for an expanded explanation of what’s going on.

Xbox players, we’ve seen your questions about if/when you can expect Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox. We’ve had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 in the works for some time, but we have run into some technical issues – particularly with split-screen co-op. We are 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 want to get peoples hopes up until we’re sure we can deliver.

There’s no platform exclusivity preventing us from releasing BG3 on Xbox day and date, should that be a technical possibility. If and when we do announce further platforms, we want to make sure each version lives up to our standards & expectations.

So, don’t give up hope, Xbox fans. If Larian can get it working on Xbox Series X (and also Xbox Series S), you may be facing down necro J.K. Simmons by end of year.