Larian Studios’ director of publishing Michael Douse says the studio is in discussions with Microsoft following reports of Baldur’s Gate 3 players receiving bans for recording some of the more intimate scenes on Xbox.
Word of these bans spread earlier this week, with one unfortunate fan getting locked out of playing any Xbox game that requires a network connection for a whole year after saving a few screenshots and clips of “naked camp time fun.” While it’s understandable why Microsoft may not want Baldur’s Gate 3‘s sex scenes freely distributed on its Activity Feeds, all clips and screenshots are also automatically uploaded to the servers anyway with no means of preventing it. So, players are being punished even if they have no intention of sharing the clips anywhere else.
The good news is that Larian appears to recognize this is unfair, with Douse even describing the bans as “annoying and uncool.” With any luck, the studio’s conversations with Microsoft will at least help reverse the bans and maybe see Microsoft rework its systems so Xbox users can opt out of automatic uploads, but we’ll have to wait and see. In fact, when one X (formerly Twitter) user made that very suggestion, Douse replied, “‘Simply just do X’ in game dev language is a meme. It’s not that simple.”
At this point, it almost feels like Baldur’s Gate 3 has had nothing but bad luck when it comes to the Xbox version. Even before it launched, Larian was having trouble getting it working on Microsoft’s console, eventually reaching a special arrangement to launch it without feature parity between the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles, omitting split-screen co-op from the latter.
The Xbox version finally launched in December, but players have since been forced to deal with a nasty bug that can delete save files. There are workarounds, but Larian and Microsoft are working together to permanently resolve this issue. While it’s not as if the PC and PlayStation 5 versions have been bug-free (there have been several post-launch patches), neither version has suffered similar setbacks as the Xbox version has.
