Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox Physical Edition May Have A Whole Lotta Discs [Update]

The award-winning 2023 game Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have a physical disc edition out in the wild yet. In November, Larian announced that a Deluxe Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG is set to launch this year that will give you a boxed copy for your shelf and physical discs for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, but it sounds like some parts of it are still in flux. Specifically, the Xbox Series X/S version may have expanded from a three-disc set to a four-disc set. You know that green case is gonna be thick as hell.

Larian director of publishing Michael Douse tweeted about the situation on March 1, saying that while things could change, there’s a non-zero chance the Xbox version will take up four discs. In a statement to Kotaku via DM, Douse said, “It’s definitely going to be at least three, but might be four, which is a problem. But a fun problem.”

“The plan is for it to be fully playable on disc, so that’s the reality we find ourselves in,” he said. “Silly us!”

Back before games were installed on consoles, games like the original Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation were on multiple discs that you would swap throughout a playthrough. These days, games with multiple discs use them for large installs, with one disc acting as the “play” disc you put in your console to actually start the game. The rest are there to carry data and, after installation, can just sit in the case while the designated disc does the rest of the work. But Baldur’s Gate 3 is a big game, and it sounds like getting all of it on discs as opposed to a single, massive online install is going to take more discs for the Xbox than the PlayStation 5, which will install across two discs.

Whatever happens, hopefully, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t run into the same issues Final Fantasy VII Rebirth just did, in which its discs were misprinted in Japan. The two-disc RPG had a manufacturing issue that had the data and play discs mislabeled, and while you can still play the game just by swapping the discs out, it likely gave some Japanese fans a mini heart attack when the install didn’t appear to work.

Updated: 3/4/2024, 9:42a.m. ET: Douse tweeted on March 4 that Baldur’s Gate 3 will take up four discs on Xbox Series X. According to Douse, the game is just 500mb over the data limit for three discs, and the only way to avoid a fourth would be to cut content. Because of this adjustment, the physical Xbox version will likely not ship on March 25 alongside PC and PS5 copies, but Larian is aiming for the first week of April.