Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems PS5 - Massive small freezes in Splitscreen

On 20+ hours couch coop on PS5 becomes totally unplayable because of this freezes — each character change freezes game for 7-10 sec. Opening inventory adds laggs to both players. We passed 25 hours trying to endure this difficulties but we gave up (

By the way, if you log off your coop partner — performance becomes perfect once again, when you log in — all freezes and lags come back.

And it seems that release day hot fix made it even worse (or maybe we played several hours more) — other bug added to freezes — when your character stucks with no possibility to move or target anybody in turn based mode — but this fixes with reload.

Just created this forum account to pitch in on the discussion.

I'll start by giving a short description of the issue as I've been experiencing, even if it's already been described in this thread.

In split-screen mode and after quite a few hours played, the game starts freezing / stuttering upon: 1) switching between controlled characters outside of combat, 2) linking and unlinking characters outside of combat, 3) switching between enemies in combat (ameliorated by latest hotfix), 4) creating a new controllable model (i.e. summoning) or otherwise changing your own model (shapeshift, disguise self).

Yesterday it occurred to me that what *could* be causing the stutter is that the game, for some reason, is having trouble accessing the respective character's inventory items (and spells) and needs its sweet time to load it; I assumed this could be the case for several reasons:
1) seemingly, there is a discrepancy between the time periods it takes for the game to destutter for each character, i.e. one character 'loads' more quickly than another;
2) inventory is the one thing (alongside spell lists, as I realised this morning) that grows proportionally to your time played, and it is the one thing (again alongside spell lists) that is disproportionate between different characters - your main will, naturally, have more items in their inventory if you play as them more often outside of combat;
3) spell and action lists, as mentioned in point 2 above, also grow proportionally to time played but also at a different pace for different classes; this is seemingly confirmed by my observations that spellcasters take *a lot* more time to destutter than melee characters.

I have thus far only managed to test my inventory hypothesis, and while the issue does not disappear completely, it is drastically ameliorated for characters whose entire inventory I've dumped back to camp.

I assume the issue is not entirely fixed due to said character's spell list - so I'm going to have to respec later today to test whether a smaller spell list leads to shorter freezing/stuttering.

I really hope Larian is reading this thread, because this issue needs to be resolved quickly.

I agree, inventory cleanup does appear to decrease the freezing. It's still there and still annoying, but it makes it more manageable.

I haven't gone so far as to dump an entire inventory to camp, I may try that and compare.

I haven't noticed a difference with spellcasters. I'm generally switching between a bard and fighter and the freeze duration is similar.

I wanted to jump in and add more to this thread too, there's a slew of UI issues I've noticed so far in addition to frame rate drops:

- Frame rate drops & freezes well documented in this thread.
- No dynamic split screen, which I think is part of what's causing freezing issues. Combat needs to get back to DOS2, merged into one shared screen.
- Certain fire effects do not display fire, just embers on the ground. Is this intentional? It can be extremely hard to see on a split screen which is forced into a small resolution.
- UI is squished because inventory is shared; DOS2 had individual inventory so you got large, easy to see UI.
- Books, letters, text are almost impossible to read; they're extremely small.
- No encumbrance or weight displayed for party, and on certain items gone completely (picked up a Mind Flayer on accident at the start of the game, he had no encumbrance weight associated with him).
- PS5 overlay stuck in top left, I keep seeing my screen name, its clipping through certain game texts.

I imagine if you are running builds that rely less on summons / transformations, so you only have the shorter character freezes it might be tolerable. Also depends how far you are I think. We're 40 hours in and it got progressively worse, but we were pushing through before then. Agree its a great game, but for us this definitely falls somewhere at the border or playable vs unplayable, and of course that will be different for different people. Its absolutely not what I would expect from a console release though where the expectations are that the hardware should be perfectly capable of running all software launched on it.

The form I completed and uploaded to wouldn't take video files and indicated save file or screenshot. Also the size limit is 64mb, not gonna get a video off the PS5 with that size restriction given that it can record only in 4k or 1920x1080 with little control over the compression.

I got around this by choosing a different submission type rather than 'bug'. Can't remember exactly which one I chose, but they did respond via email.

So, I just tried dumping my iventory and respeccing to level 1.

I could switch from Shadowheart to the dumped character with a VERY SLIGHT delay, under 1 second, while switching back to Shadowheart dragged the game to a halt for 4-ish seconds. The issue was not eliminated for the dumped custom character, it just gets several magnitudes better.

I'd like to ask that others try this out. If anything, it will confirm whether I'm a madman or not.

Great list! My fiancee and I have been having freezes in all of these situations as well. Some of them are short (<5 seconds) like when switching characters, but some of them like summoning during combat can seem to take at least 10 seconds. All of the small freezes was half of why we just gave up last night playing in split screen and just started passing the controller back and forth (The other half was due to a cursor glitch where we couldn't target enemies, cast spells, jump, or sometimes even move in combat until we restarted the app). The small freezes really have put a damper on the experience because they're seeming to get worse and happen allllll of the time.

I really appreciate the effort you're all putting into giving detailed descriptions on the issues. I've seen a lot of negativity and toxicity in the forums lately (still better than other places such as steam discussions lol) which makes me think Larian might not read the forums and only the bug reports.

I did want to submit a few reports but yeah, it asks for the save files which just creates a barrier for us on ps5.

Did anyone had a bug that a camp supplies bag appears on the floor but can't be interacted with when the 2nd player connects?

They may have changed the attachment requirement, I just submitted another report without one. PS5 version.

Is there any reason why the game is forced into Quality Mode when split screen ?

Enabling Performance mode seems that it could be a good temporary fix for these issues.

The game does not go into quality mode during split screen. Switching between quality and performance does not appear to have any effect on the freezing.

I also tried dumping all inventory from my characters and resetting their level and it did not have any noticeable effect in the freeze, still lasts 3-4 sec

Reading all that I can only confirm and beg Larian to act on what is happening to split screen coop performance.

I'm playing with my wife and we're like ~45 hours in. It's haaaard. So many actions cause lags (it was all mentioned here) and we endure because we love the game and story so much, but definitely, the experience is not great because of it. If it would be any other game I think we would drop it and wait for a fix instead of pushing through it.

Lack of a dynamically merging camera is also a huge miss, especially after playing Divinity Original Sin 2, which had a great coop split screen experience.

Larian if you're reading this, please address performance issues ASAP. Having a merged camera would be such a great addition to couch coop too.

Adding another experience confirming the poor split screen performance.

About 20 hours in (just started Act2), and it's been bad since around hour 5.

Same actions that every one has been noting. It's been rough but playable, but it's getting noticeably worse as we progress. Might just drop split screen and do the controller hand off for a while. Not ideal, but workable.

I completely understand. We've been talking if we should stop playing everyday now. The freezes in addition to the cursor bug that only goes back to normal with saving and loading the game again takes so much time. We're playing everyday after work and it feels we're attempting to play a game our hardware doesn't support which might end up just being poor optimization on their proprietary engine. I really wanted to know if they are considering fixing it, it would motivate us to push forward.

This is where we're at too. We'll likely stop using split screen and just pass the controller if we continue.

The cursor/targeting issue is almost a bigger problem than the freezing since saving and reloading can take over a minute (not to mention the pain of trying to complete a combat encounter with it active).

edit: I don't know if Larian reads this but I want to add just how disappointing it is. This is my wife's first CRPG and we were having a blast, the story, characters, combat is all great. And that's why these issues are so frustrating. If the game wasn't good we would have quit by now.

Last night my fiancée was playing as shadowheart and summoned a guardian of faith, and I timed a 33 second freeze. It seems to just be getting worse as we progress and that long of a complete freeze (without crashing) is likely the worst I’ve encountered in any game.

Experiencing all the same laggy, freezing issues mentioned here on split screen couch co-op, but none of the issues when not in multi. Playing from a fresh game PS5, not an imported file. These problems worsened after about 20 hrs of gameplay.

We're trying our best to power through and play despite it but it's really testing our patience. Definitely can't play the whole game like this...

Larian please fix this

My wife and I also bought this game strictly to play split-screen co-op, like with DOS and DOS-2... the lag has been excruciating after the first 15 hours or so, and we have basically stopped our playthrough; the lag we could deal with (mostly) but the being unable to target things/move characters in combat bug that started happening as well was just the icing on the cake.

It looks like the pc version is ahead of PS5 as far as patches/bug fixes goes... does anyone know if the split screen on the pc version also has the delay-lag , or is that a PS5 Exclusive feature?