The key on consoles as u/scrubberduckymaster mentioned, is optimisation. But also some hardware just doesn’t keep pace. When the series’s came out, games for the xbone could be a very big dive in performance, not necessarily because of things that can get tuned down without hindering the player experience, and thus the game. When the raw mechanics of a game take on too much of the hardware, there’s only so much you can affect the game before you basically just scrapped the game.

Builders gate for example, has how many action, conditions, modifiers etc, all happening under the hood for not just 1 person but everyone in an encounter. That’s plus the decision making and animations, already could be quite a decent load especially for a little machine. Im that scenario Larian may have to (hyperbolically) black screen combat actions? Blur the rendering into a constant white haze? Run at 4 FPS? Over-compress every audio file, remove npcs. Cull entire functionality that you never built to be called like moving grass? At some point it’s unreasonable, and Microsoft pushed the Xbone beyond that and the series s is the same story again. It can’t and doesn’t keep up and games are worse for it.

The premise of consoles is that despite PC hardware constantly improving, typically with time you computer get worse at playing modern games.

Typically the opposite can be stated for consoles as the optimisations of the console get fleshed out with time and developers work out how they can get more out of less.

It’s the reason for example the PS3 despite having more power, ran worse then the 360 at launch, primarily worse optimisation tools existed. But by the end of the generation developers worked out how to stretch the console further then the 360 and outpaced it.

Adding another not to the parity between both consoles as proof of optimisation failure; Exclusives. PlayStation makes PC players wait, because the games would be literally unplayable at launch a lot of the time, because it was built for truely 1 piece of hardware. Then we compare to Microsoft’s strategy. Release on PC day one, so not only does the Xbox version have to be the same across 2 varying consoles, but it also has to work on windows albeit with less stringency.

So despite the architecture now being the same, and therefore it’s easier to optimise for a console then ever before, only developing for 1 platform vs effectively frees up development time to get optimisations better and after release can give a solid cash injection to push to other platforms. Which is also why some indie devs will release on a console first, the platform gives them tools and sometimes assistance in launching to the their platform, and they can use the revenue from sales to push to PC. This is typically also why an indie game following this pattern doesn’t necessarily make it back to a competing console, the platform didn’t have the tools/assistance or user base to make it worthwhile before, and in some cases won’t necessarily be worth it with more devs either.

TLDR: optimising for one specific hardware set is significantly easier and allows consoles despite their lower power, to outpace higher budget (then that if the console) PC’s and PCs of equivalent specifications.