"Suboptimal", says director of publishing.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has some meaty patches with some equally-meaty space requirements—and while it might be easy to moan about having to corner off a bunch of room on our SSDs for patches, at least we aren’t playing on the Xbox version of the digital deluxe. It has four disks—twice as many as the PS5 version, and four times as many as on the PC version. According to a beleaguered director of publishing, it turns out that’s not really supposed to happen anymore.
After Larian’s Michael Douse confirmed that “the Xbox retail version of Baldur’s Gate 3 will indeed have four discs” on Twitter, he spoke with PC Gamer’s Ted Litchfield about the phenomena via email.
When Ted asks him whether the team felt a sense of pride about the whole thing—Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive game, after all—the disk-besieged director replies “No.” He then adds: “It’s funny, and that’s always valuable, but as I understand it the additional discs will have to be packaged in little slips, inserted into the case, since there’s no four disc case. While they’ll be included in the shrink-wrapped case, it’s in a way that feels suboptimal.”
Douse adds that he’s “proud we could do a physical release that includes the entire experience on the disc, because that’s important for archiving”, but laments how 2024 has been “acting against it”. As for why Larian can’t make a custom Xbox game box (say that ten times really fast) with ample room for four disks, he notes that Larian controls “very little when it comes to the actual video game box itself. At that point it becomes hell. Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to package discs in a really cool way, but the rules are the rules.”
In case you’re wondering why there’s a two-disk difference between the PlayStation and Xbox versions, Douse says that’s due to “larger capacity disks and different compression methods for data … you’re not getting lower-quality data, I literally mean the compression method is just more efficient.”
While it might be easy for us to turn up our nose and chortle at our beleaguered console cousins, I want to point out that the PC Digital Deluxe edition uses a “CD Key and Installer”, according to the website—rather than a physical disk with the entire game on it, rendering that portion of the physical Digital Deluxe on PC mostly symbolic. While PlayStation and Xbox players will be swarmed with disks, they’ll still be able to play the game raw.
Well—they’ll be able to play patch 5 raw, at least. “Discs will always be behind patches due to lead times. They’re long, and annoying. Players can play the game from the disc, or they can install and patch. Up to them.”
At the end of it all, Douse observes that “Retail is ageing, I don’t think first parties are going to be innovating there any time soon,” though he’s “happy to be proved wrong.”
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