I feel like their planning for it was really shortsighted - like they were hoping to get a as many people to buy the console as possible so they could “win” the console war early by having more people adopt it by putting out a cheap console people who didn’t want to spend so much would be drawn to, and weren’t really thinking beyond the first few years of the generation. Maybe they figured once they had the lead, they cold get people up upgrade or something. By they didn’t get the early lead and now the cheaper console means devs can’t really fully develop for Xbox. This will only get worse as more games start getting developed.

I think the problem they've given themselves is that they pushed it as a cheaper alternative to the X whilst also maintaining that it'll be able to play the same games.

How do they go about messaging that can't be the case going forward without pissing off those that spent the money on the S in the first place.

The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU

If it was just a GPU difference, you'd be right it should be easy to just run it less pretty. But the memory limitations are the real issue. The X has 16 GB of memory and the S has 10 GB. And worse, the memory performance is drastically different. The X has 10 GB that runs at 560 GB/s and 6 that runs at 336 GB/s, where as the S has 8 GB at 224 GB/s and 2 GB at 56GB/s. (I did not miss a zero on the last value)

Split screen might be difficult for Series S due to memory constraints. Keep in mind that all assets both players are seeing must be loaded in memory simultaneously. This includes textures, models and animations. These assets are normally not loaded into the memory unless they’re visible by the camera. This becomes problematic if there are two cameras facing different parts of the map at the same time. Then you potentially need to double the memory requirements, which the Series S might not have.

did you think of the possibility that even Larian's low settings still can't run on series S? Given the amount of assets I saw it's actually quite possible that vram requirement are pretty high and that's why PS5 have delay as well so they can figure out ways to consolidate textures used etc. Like they can't even manage to let me stack rope or water bottle properly in inventory(maybe some asset id not cleaned up during development), so having excessive vram usage is fairly easy/common for content heavy games.

Feature parity is not a requirement for Deck verification, Larian simply disabled split screen on the platform and called it a day.

Microsoft requires feature parity between Series X and S versions of the same game. If you want to support split screen on Series X then you must support it on Series S as well.

The problem is the memory usage for split screen multi player. Steam Deck doesn't do split screen.

The Series S is more powerful: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2022-steam-deck-vs-xbox-series-s-how-future-proof-is-the-valve-handheld

But the Steam Deck is a portable console, so the design considerations are different, so it's a bit of an apple to oranges comparison. On pure numbers, though, Series S will perform better. (Steam Deck is still awesome though 👍)

I think people would be mad. Imagine you play a game at your friend's home on his Series X, and then proceed to buy the game so you can play multiplayer online, only to then have a certain features or game modes missing (say you get team death match but not battle royale because it uses too much memory).

It's not that easy to communicate feature disparity. Some people probably don't even know which Xbox they have.

Problem is that it can turn into a slippery slope. Where should MS draw the line if they start to allow Series X exclusive content? Can developers cut entire game modes from the S version if they just ask kindly enough? Or maybe ignore the S version completely? The risk is that developers are going to abuse this opportunity.

MS wants people to see the Series S as a viable purchase. Why should you buy it when you won’t be able to play the next big release in full?

Not sure you can accuse Larian of being lazy. When was the last time you saw a PC game work this flawlessly from launch?

It's the lack of RAM causing the issues apparently, rather than power. If they could cut the split screen mode from the S it would be fine, but they can't.

Larian have disabled split screen on the Steam Deck to account for that lower power. They can't do the same thing for the XBox S release because Microsoft demand feature parity with the X.

that doesn't mean we get better games on the xss, but that we get worse games on xsx and ps5. I paid for that power, I want my games to use it. I don't care that it doesn't run as well on a lesser console I deliberately chose not to buy because of its lesser power

If they’d taken the Series S as the base line during development, they would have made life a lot easier for themselves.

The problem is that the baseline is actually the PS5. It outsells both versions of the Xbox by a factor of 2. So the Xbox Series S is an afterthought, and always will be.

The baseline system is almost always the most popular system. No developers should be hamstrung by MS’s bad business decisions.

I’m not sure that having BG3 run at 540p 30hz on the latest MS console will be good for Larian.

The issue here isn’t frame rate or graphics, it’s that with the memory issues on the series S, they can’t get split screen to run. It runs just fine on X, but won’t on S. Because Xbox demands parity, they can’t just disable the feature like they did for Steamdeck.

If we take the series s as the baseline in development, we'll get games that don't take full advantage of the better hardware. They shouldn't have to make their game run on potato grade hardware. I think they hit a great balance, it runs great on most modern gaming pc's, and the series x and ps5 will have no issues running it either.