Baldur’s Gate 3 wins The Game Awards, and it’s now out on Xbox!

thesixthaxis.com:

Baldur’s Gate 3 had a huge night at The Game Awards 2023, winning Game of the Year and then just launching the game on Xbox Series X|S. Surprise!

Having been nominated in nine categories, Larian Studios were able to snag six wins overall, including:

It was an impressive showing for what has ended up being a landmark game release, but Larian had a big night planned, regardless of what happened. Coming several months behind the PC and PS5 releases, Baldur’s Gate 3 was released last night during The Game Awards as well.

Larian boss Swen Vincke has been pretty candid in saying that they were aiming to get the game out on Xbox before the end of 2023, and as we crawled into December, launching during The Game Awards was always going to be one of the splashiest ways of doing just that. Vincke was even sat in the audience in a suit of armour!

Baldur’s Gate 3 got its full release for PC in August (after a good few years in Early Access), with the PS5 version following a month later. Earlier this year it was half expected that the game simply wouldn’t be coming to Xbox, with Larian initially saying that it was being held back by bugs, and that they could only commit if those issues were resolved.

Those issues, it turned out, were mainly a spec requirement for Xbox games, and were resolved when Vincke sat down with Xbox boss Phil Spencer at Gamescom and hashed out a specific exception to needing feature parity between Xbox Series X and Series S consoles. With Spencer’s blessing, the Series S version does not have split-screen co-op at launch, which will mean it misses out on one key game feature when compared to Series X, PlayStation 5 and PC. They’ll be trying to add it to the mix down the line.

In our Baldur’s Gate 3 review, Dom said,