Gaming

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.

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.

The Series S is basically an X with a weaker GPU

And significantly less RAM, which is probably the issue here.

The main difficulty with split screen is that you need to be able to fit everything you need to render the scene into RAM, twice. Let's go through some cases:

Just rendering to a higher resolution still lets you get away with the same amount of RAM if you use low-res textures, or a moderate increase because you're using high-res textures, but only in the foreground -- all you need is enough GPU compute power to push the pixels.

If you're rendering VR both camera perspectives are going to be nearly identical, looking at the same objects, so RAM use is nearly identical to a single camera. Your frame time targets are much stricter in VR, you have to have high and very regular fps or people are going to puke, but again that's compute pressure, not memory pressure.

In the split-screen case all bets are off: When players are at opposite sides of the map there may be literally zero meshes and textures in common between those two areas and you need twice the RAM for twice the amount of camera views. Nothing in common is the worst case, yes, but it's bound to happen, and not leave PR in a situation where they have to say "We degraded performance when players are far apart to promote an atmosphere of closeness and cooperation".

Xbox owners who are not following video game news every second of the day might find themselves buying a Series S version thinking they can play co-op with their friend who owns a Series X and they…can’t.

The problem here is implied to be local co-op between X and S players?

This is the first time a console developer has released a new machine less capable than equivalent machines in the prior generation. PS3's switch to cell architecture springs to mind, which put game devs on their back feet trying to write code for it and made backwards compatibility impossible without including a PS2 in the case.

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.

If a game can't run on the Series S it means it also can't be ported to the PC. Turn down the resolution and graphics settings until you get the same fps target and continue in with your day.

I would expect any game from a developer that complains about this to be so poorly optimized that it runs like it would on the Series S on the bigger consoles, and likely have garbage gameplay as well because they spent all of their budget on graphics.

I always love when the ignorant calls other lazy for not understanding basic things about game development. They understand perfectly well what scaling is and they're not lazy. Have you played a single second of BG3? They're literally the opposite of lazy. You sound like a salty xbox fanboy.

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.

It doesn't support split screen on the Steam Deck either. If they could release without split screen support it would be out on Xbox now.

Get a proper machine then. Having a cheap Console device is a sign of laziness.

Why don't you work harder and get a better device?

Why do you think Halo never got split screen 💁‍♂️

There’s a difference between targeting 3-4 console SKUs and targeting 2. If you know what’s going to be your baseline from day 1, you test against that and scale up rather than the other way around. With a first party studio, this is a given.