Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback PS5 Split Screen becomes unplayable

The PS5 version of the game becomes progressively unplayable in split screen until it becomes completely unplayable.

It started off really well - the first 10 hours of the game were great and we were loving it.

Somewhere between 10-20 hours we began to notice performance issues. Specifically every time either player switches characters the game freezes for a few seconds. This includes out-of-combat, in combat, and even when ending one turn to being another. This is very interrupting but, but was somewhat tolerable at first. I don't know for sure, but the length of the delays seems be increasing as we play. We are now at about 50 hours.

However, more bugs have began to arise. I have submitted a few bug reports via the tool, but the bugs or performance issues have become too numerous / frequent to keep track of.

Sometimes cut scenes do not play video at all. Specifically the entire encounter with Raphael was a white screen. There have been other instances, but less egregious and than this.

Sometimes during cut scenes the audio will stop playing for one or two lines (mouth animations stop in sync with the lost audio), and then picks back up again. Subtitles remain accurate.

Once during play my custom character simply disappeared after a cut scene - leaving me controlling my companion instead. Gone completely, no way to recover. We had to load a previous save to recover him.

The final straw for us was a bug that started cropping up when we first reached the mountain pass - our companion characters would not be able to move in combat. We would get no cursor. We could activate ability, switch characters, access the inventory, really do any other action, except move. This is obviously game-breaking. At first, it was rare, or infrequent, but tonight we quit because it now occurs on every single turn of combat.

If we did not have so much fun playing D:OS I and II in split screen, we would probably be asking for a refund. For now, we are just going to put it down and hope these issues are resolved. In the meantime, I suggest anyone looking to play in split screen avoid it for now.

Split screen does seem to have a lot of issues; we've experienced pretty much all of the ones you mentioned. For example, It takes over 30 seconds to unfreeze after summoning a spiritual weapon. We ultimately just started passing a single controller back and forth until the issues are resolved, and we haven't had the freezing or cursor issues so far.

I've mentioned almost all of the above in my feedbacks and bug reports, but this I forgot! Yes, I was so sad that I didn't actually SEE anything! And my previous save was waaaay back, so going back wasn't an option... and I don't know if it would even work if I had tried to load it again.

Split screen for couch co-op players is straight up BROKEN.

In another thread about split screen (yes, there are more than one which shows the disappointment we have) another member posted this link.
Along with making sure to keep these threads up near the top so they are visible to Larian, please fill this out and send it to them directly. Also, make sure to choose Feedback and not Bug.

https://larian.com/support/baldur-s-gate-3#modal

These are the exact issues we've encountered too. The more the game progresses the worse it gets. My theory is the game maintaining all the data for approval ratings with party members, consequences of decisions from earlier acts, etc. makes performance worse as you go along. I'm afraid of what Act 3 will be like, we're still in Act 2.

We can tolerate the 5-6 second freezing when switching characters, dropped lines of dialogue, 30 seconds freezes when summoning, etc. but the inability to move characters in combat is a game breaker. If Larian could fix that, it would at least allow us to keep playing through the other frustrations. The other issue is most publications aside from IGN have done nothing to highlight this issue, likely because they haven't spent 40+ hours in PS5 split screen gameplay. People should be warned to stay away from PS5 split screen co-op until this is fixed.

As you said, for now we have to consider abandoning a 50hr playthrough until Larian addresses the game breaking bug that prevents players from moving characters in combat.

We are now at 1 week after the official PS5 launch. I was hoping that they would have a big patch planned that would finally address this issue so many of us are having. Radio silence is not a good look Larian.

Does anyone know if there is a way to tag the people on these forums who actually work for Larian? If so, maybe that will get their attention.