Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev Reacts To Suggestion That Xbox ‘Misjudged’ The Game’s Potential

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been one of the biggest success stories of 2023, and while the game is definitely coming to Xbox Series X|S in the near future, it’s been suggested that Microsoft perhaps “misjudged” the game’s potential.

This all comes from a Polygon report about the big Xbox leak yesterday, with the outlet pointing out that Microsoft described Baldur’s Gate 3 back in 2022 as a “second-run Stadia PC RPG”, and therefore appeared to categorise it as having a low level of “wow factor” for Xbox Game Pass.

However, this is something that seems totally unsurprising to Michael Douse, Director of Publishing at Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios. In a tweet yesterday, Douse admitted that everyone was misjudging the game prior to its release, and this was because of the way the company approached the situation:

“In their defence, so did everyone else. Same with Divinity: Original Sin 2. Comes with the genre, and the way we approach things, and the way we execute things. There just isn’t any existing data that could have told anyone how BG3 was going to perform. We just had to take giant spooky leaps.”

In other words, Douse doesn’t blame Microsoft for overlooking how much of a gigantic success Baldur’s Gate 3 would end up becoming. And to Microsoft’s credit, there have been plans for an Xbox Series X|S port of the game for some time now, but they were unfortunately derailed by issues with the Series S version specifically.

Those issues seemed to be so severe that Larian Studios ended up announcing the Series S version won’t support local co-op when it arrives, but the upside is that we’ll definitely be playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox before the end of 2023. It’s been a rocky road for BG3 and Xbox without a doubt, but we’ll be enjoying it sooner rather than later!