Baldur’s Gate 3 Coming to PC Early To Avoid Games Like Starfield, Cyberpunk DLC

Larian Studios is porting its upcoming RPG Baldur’s Gate 3It’s coming out a bit, and that means good and bad news depending on whether you’re planning to play the game on PC or PlayStation 5.

The RPG, known as a follow-up to the original BioWare Dungeons and Dragons-inspired series was originally scheduled to leave Early Access and become a real video game on August 31. Now, however, the PlayStation 5 version has been pushed back a week to September 6. The trade-off is that the version of PC launches nearly a full month early on August 3.

In an interview with my city, Larian founder Swen Vincke said the decision to move the PC version by a few weeks was because early August seemed like a better time to get the game to PC players, rather than hold it until the console version is ready as well. When looked at the stacked 2023 release calendarVincke said pushing it to August 3 makes sense because it won’t be competing against other September RPGs like the upcoming sci-fi open-world RPG Starfieldand the Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty expansion.

“We wanted to make the ship the same, and then we realized that it wasn’t going to happen, we started looking at what it was possible to get it out,” said Vincke my city. “Then we saw that it was a very busy year, with Zeldawith the deviland Starfieldwith the Cyberpunkand then there is Final Fantasy—so we started looking ‘okay, well, what’s the good spot when people will be able to play and they’re not going to be fighting for attention?’ We have this game really ready to use on PC. So August 3 looks good. That’s why we chose it.”

As for the console versions, Vincke explained that Larian’s priority is to reach a stable 60 FPS framerate, which is why the PS5 version will launch a month later, and the Xbox Series X/S version is still being done.

“PS5, we want to reach that 60 FPS, we’re close to that,” Vincke said.
So we want extra time. It also takes some time to go through the submissions. And so it happened. With Xbox we need a little more time. There are different requirements out there. But we’re hitting those too, it just takes a little extra time.”

When Baldur’s Gate 3 was originally announced for the PlayStation 5, it was notably not confirmed for the Xbox Series X/S, prompting Larian to issue a statement as to why. Turns out, the studio doesn’t have any kind of exclusivity deal, just this having trouble getting the game’s splitscreen co-op to work on the less powerful Xbox Series S. Right now, the Xbox version still doesn’t have a release date, but Vincke said my city the porting process is still ongoing.

“With Xbox, it’s a different platform, it has, as you know, two platforms really,” Vincke said. “And so we have to see where we’ve gone. And the team is committed to working on this, it’s been a long time. So they’re slowly moving forward, you know, like, you break a performance barrier and go to Next.

“So just a moment. It just needs work. This is progress. And sometimes you have some setbacks, and sometimes you make progress. Our preference is that everyone is in the same boat. But yeah, it’s in some cases, you just have to say like, it’s going to take a little more work than we want.”

As for how Microsoft feels about not getting the game onto its system at the same time as its competitor, Vincke said the Xbox maker has “been great,” and is “supporting” the studio.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been in Early Access since 2020 and has been receiving periodic updates and overhauls for the past three years. Naturally, it had some bugginess and missing features at the time, but it was showed a lot of promise in a year already stacked with massive RPGs.