// PC GAMER — GAMING
BioWare's co-founder fought to make Baldur's Gate 3 for over a decade, then Larian did it instead: 'I don't really get jealous'
Just as there were multiple Bhaalspawn, there was never really just one Baldur's Gate 3.
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"We could not convince people to fund Baldur's Gate 3," says Trent Oster. It's a stunning statement to hear now, on the other side of Larian's smash hit bear sex extravaganza. But for two decades beforehand, other developers tried and failed to get Baldur's Gate 3 made.
The first was Black Isle, which slapped the title on a doomed D&D game in the early noughties, when the ailing RPG studio was slipping from one cancellation to another. Then, half a decade on, Obsidian took a shot at Baldur's Gate 3—starting work on a third-person, party-based RPG that in some ways would have resembled Mass Effect, only with a much more expansive style of exploration. Atari Europe's sale to Bandai Namco put paid to that plan, ending Obsidian's discussions with the publisher. But a third studio began its own push soon afterwards: Oster's own Beamdog.
If Oster was persistent in pursuing Baldur's Gate 3, it's because it was personal. As a co-founder of BioWare, he worked on the 1997 original, before directing Neverwinter Nights. Even now, he's best known as the de facto custodian of BioWare's early works. If you're playing those games today, you're probably running Beamdog's Enhanced Editions.
But Beamdog always intended to be more than museum curators. It was 2014 when Oster first told me he was hoping to make a Baldur's Gate sequel. And in 2016, Beamdog put out an expansion to the original game, Siege of Dragonspear. Unfortunately, the majority of the team behind it fell apart in the wake of targeted Gamergate attacks.
"We were sailing down the river and then all the cannons opened up so we just shut all the hatches," Oster told me a few years ago. "And you could hear cannonballs bang the hull, and everybody was just huddled down inside. It basically fractured that team. It drove some of them out of the industry."
Nevertheless, Beamdog regrouped, and recruited Dragon Age scribe David Gaider as creative director. During his two year stint at the company, Beamdog proposed a version of Baldur's Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast.
Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as big picture as what Larian pitched.
"Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as big picture as what Larian pitched," Oster says today. "Obviously, we were doing it at a much smaller scope. It wasn't going to be a $100 million game. I think we were pitching it in the $20 million range."