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'

BioWare's Co-Founder and the Long Road to Baldur's Gate 3

"We could not convince people to fund Baldur's Gate 3," says Trent Oster, co-founder of BioWare. It's a striking admission to hear now, with Larian Studios' Baldur's Gate 3 having become a cultural phenomenon. But for over two decades, various developers attempted—and failed—to bring the long-awaited sequel to life.

The first attempt came from Black Isle Studios in the early 2000s, when the struggling RPG studio was plagued by cancellations. Then, Obsidian Entertainment tried their hand at Baldur's Gate 3 in 2008, developing a third-person, party-based RPG that would have shared similarities with Mass Effect, but with a more expansive style of exploration. However, the sale of Atari Europe to Bandai Namco ended those discussions, effectively putting an end to Obsidian's efforts. Shortly after, Beamdog, founded by Oster, began its own push to bring Baldur's Gate 3 into existence.

A Personal Mission

Oster's persistence in pursuing Baldur's Gate 3 is deeply personal. As a co-founder of BioWare, he worked on the original 1997 game before directing Neverwinter Nights. Even today, he's widely regarded as the de facto custodian of BioWare's early works. If you're playing those games now, it's likely through Beamdog's Enhanced Editions.

But Beamdog was never content with simply preserving the past. In 2014, Oster first mentioned his desire to create a Baldur's Gate sequel. By 2016, Beamdog released the expansion Siege of Dragonspear for the original game. Unfortunately, the team behind it suffered a major setback due to targeted Gamergate attacks.

"We were sailing down the river and then all the cannons opened up, so we just shut all the hatches," Oster said 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."

Despite the setbacks, Beamdog regrouped and recruited David Gaider, the Dragon Age scribe, as their creative director. During his time at Beamdog, the company 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," 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."

The game would have used the original Baldur's Gate isometric view but in a 3D engine—specifically Unreal. "It would have stayed pretty close to the formula," Oster says. "I think we were pretty tight with just carrying forward what worked."

A Compromise in Combat

Beamdog's approach to combat would have differed from Larian's eventual turn-based system. Instead, they intended to stick with Baldur's Gate's original real-time with pause combat style. "At its heart, real-time with pause is a compromise," Oster admits. "It's allowing things to flow until the moment you get worried, and then you need to pause it. And the pausing allows you to take the time to make those decisions and execute at a higher tactical level. But because you can pause, the entire game has to be balanced around the fact that you could pause at any time. Which then forces you to pause all the time. So it's a sticky mess."

Still, Oster believes the compromise is better than the alternative. "I have an Achilles heel, which is that the older I get, the less patience I have for slow-moving games," he says. "To me, real-time with pause walks a line that I kind of like. If you're rolling into a fight and it's just some goblins, you mow them down, it takes six seconds. Whereas in a turn-based game, you allocate 20 minutes to just beating up six goblins."

The Funding Gap

Despite their efforts, Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 3 never moved forward. Wizards of the Coast was unwilling to fund the project, and other publishers were reluctant to invest. "It came down to funding," Oster says. "All the companies out there were like, 'It's a singleplayer RPG, it's not going to do that big in numbers, and Wizards owns the IP. So why are we spending our money to increase the value of their IP? Why don't we do our own IP?'"

As a result, Beamdog shifted focus to a different RPG called Cold West. "The idea was that all the fairies and monsters of Europe fled west to the New World as Europe continued to become overpopulated," Oster says. "The humans just came behind them, and they finally decided, 'Well, screw it, we're going to make a stand here.' And it was basically Wild West fairies, vampires and ghouls, against gunslingers and spellslingers."

The Rise of Larian

Publishers remained hesitant, and Oster notes that the success of Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 didn't necessarily help other developers get singleplayer RPGs greenlit. "Now everybody's like, 'Oh, well, sure, RPGs will sell a lot, but they have to be huge, and you've got to put a ton of money into them, and you've got to have seven romanceable characters and full fidelity conversations, and it's got to be all performance captured and super high-res.' You're like, 'Yeah, I'm not sure about that.'"

When asked about his feelings regarding Larian's success, Oster is surprisingly unfazed. "I don't really get jealous about things," he says. "I'm like, 'Hey, you guys had the same opportunities we had, but you just happened to have a bunch of capital behind you that allowed you to roll in on it. And then you had enough capital that you're able to execute at a very high scale, and you were able to pay the costs of chasing the vision that you had.'"

Today, much of Beamdog's staff is working on co-development projects with Obsidian Entertainment, including Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. There's something poetic about these two studios—both once vying for the Baldur's Gate 3 dream—coming together to create singleplayer RPGs regardless of the odds.