Black Myth Wukong on Xbox is still happening, but Game Science is starting to make excuses

Black Myth Wukong’s Xbox release is still in development, but when the port might launch is anyone’s guess

Game Science

Black Myth Wukong’s Xbox release is still in development, but when the port might launch is anyone’s guess, thanks, perhaps, to issues getting the action-RPG to run on Xbox Series S. That’s what Game Science CEO Feng Ji said on Weibo, anyway, as he blamed the console’s limited RAM for the port’s continued delay after expressing gratitude for Black Myth winning Steam’s player’s choice award.

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“Although there were no big surprises, I still felt a little emotional after taking all of them [Steam Awards],” Feng Ji said (as translated on ResetEra). Everyone's fighting power is so terrifying, but the only thing missing is the Xbox robe... It seems a bit wrong (but that 10G shared memory, without a few years of optimization experience, it really can't be taken down).”

This scenario isn’t the first time we’ve heard about problems developing for Xbox Series X and Series S simultaneously. Larian encountered issues getting Baldur’s Gate 3’s excellent co-op to work on Series S, which prompted the studio to delay BG3’s Xbox release. They worked under the impression that any game on Xbox had to launch with feature parity, meaning any feature that worked on Series X had to function on Series S as well – because that’s what Xbox said in its developer guidelines. Xbox later said this wasn’t a hard rule.

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Game Science previously blamed Xbox for Black Myth’s port delay, though Xbox responded by saying the Series S wasn’t to blame and vaguely suggested Game Science had an exclusivity deal with Sony (they didn’t). 

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Finger pointing and ridiculous blame games aside, Game Science’s complaint is rather odd. Black Myth Wukong requires 16 GB of RAM on PC, which is a lot. Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle also require 16 GB of RAM, and they run on Xbox Series S. Granted, they look less impressive than their PC and Series X counterparts, but lower framerate and resolution are part of a trade-off Series S owners have dealt with since the system launched. Optimizing to run efficiently on a less powerful platform isn’t easy, of course, but suggesting it requires several years of additional effort seems like a bit of a stretch.

Whatever the reason, and however inexperienced Game Science may or may not be with getting games to work properly, it sounds like you shouldn’t expect Black Myth Wukong on Xbox anytime soon.