Trent Oster says he couldn’t get Baldur’s Gate 3 funded for more than a decade—despite having BioWare roots and later leading Beamdog’s bid for the sequel. After multiple studios’ efforts stalled, Larian made the game instead, and Oster says he isn’t jealous—j
For years, the idea of Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t sit comfortably on a shelf. It kept tugging at people who knew the original intimately—until the money ran out, teams fell apart, and the project slipped into someone else’s hands.
Trent Oster, a co-founder of BioWare, remembers the moment it became personal. He worked on the 1997 original Baldur’s Gate. then directed Neverwinter Nights. and for players today he’s still closely tied to BioWare’s early legacy—especially through Beamdog’s Enhanced Editions. But when the prospect of a Baldur’s Gate sequel returned, Oster didn’t treat it like nostalgia. He treated it like something that had to happen.
He also says he tried—and failed—to make it happen.
“We could not convince people to fund Baldur’s Gate 3,” Oster says. The sentence lands differently now, on the other side of Larian’s breakout hit, a game that didn’t just survive the wait, it became a cultural moment.
Long before Larian built it, other studios tried.
Black Isle slapped the title “Baldur’s Gate 3” onto a doomed D&D game in the early noughties. as the ailing RPG studio cycled through cancellations. Then. about half a decade later. Obsidian made its own attempt—starting work on a third-person. party-based RPG that. in some ways. would have resembled Mass Effect. but with a more expansive style of exploration. Atari Europe’s sale to Bandai Namco ended Obsidian’s discussions with the publisher.
A third effort followed quickly: Oster’s own Beamdog.
It wasn’t just a pitch. It was an uphill fight that started long before Larian’s version existed. Oster told a story of how the chase began in real time: it was 2014 when he first said Beamdog was hoping to make a Baldur’s Gate sequel. and in 2016 Beamdog released an expansion to the original game. Siege of Dragonspear.
The expansion’s success didn’t turn into momentum. Oster describes how a large part of the team fractured after “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 him 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.”.
Even with that damage, Beamdog regrouped.
In what Oster describes as a reset, Beamdog recruited Dragon Age writer David Gaider as creative director. During Gaider’s two-year stint at the company, Beamdog proposed a version of Baldur’s Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast.
But Oster says the scale was the difference from the beginning.
“Our Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t as big picture as what Larian pitched,” Oster says. “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.”
He says their idea would have moved the original’s isometric look into a 3D engine—Unreal, specifically—while keeping close to the “formula” that made the earlier games work.
“It would have stayed pretty close to the formula,” Oster says. “I think we were pretty tight with just carrying forward what worked.”
Combat, too, would have followed a different path than the one Larian later took. Beamdog intended to keep the series’ original approach: real-time combat with pause, rather than adopting a turn-based system.
“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.”.
Even so, Oster argues the trade-off can still be worth it—especially for players who don’t want to spend every encounter locked into turn order.
“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.”.
Yet the core problem never changed: funding.
Oster says Wizards of the Coast wasn’t prepared to foot the bill itself, and other publishers weren’t willing either.
“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?’”
When those negotiations stalled, Beamdog pivoted. The company ended up pitching a different RPG named Cold West.
Oster described its premise as a continent-scale reversal: “The idea was that all the fairies and monsters of Europe fled west to the New World as Europe continued to become overpopulated. 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.”.
Publishers’ reluctance didn’t ease when Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 launched, Oster says. He argues the lesson some industry observers drew from the game wasn’t a simple permission slip for smaller, riskier single-player RPGs.
“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 has to be all performance captured and super high-res.’ You’re like. ‘Yeah. I’m not sure about that.’”.
That’s where the feeling in Oster’s voice shifts. He says he isn’t jealous—but he does sound frustrated by how the industry absorbed the success.
“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, Beamdog’s staff are tied to co-development with Obsidian, the same studio that once worked on its own Baldur’s Gate 3 discussions. Oster points to that link with a sense of inevitability—and also a quiet pride that the single-player RPG instinct hasn’t disappeared.
“There’s something poetic about these two would-be Baldur’s Gate 3 studios banding together to make singleplayer RPGs regardless. ” Oster says. “It’s kind of neat,” he says. “It’s like having a big brother, and you can peek in. Working with Obsidian, we’ve run across a lot of things that they did better than we ever did. And it’s like, ‘Oh wow, that’s really smart, we’re totally stealing that.’”.
The projects he mentions with Obsidian are Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2.
Still, for all the momentum in today’s RPG landscape, Oster says there’s a creative trade being made.
“It’s just a little too mainstream and acceptable right now,” he says.
Inside Beamdog, he describes small efforts to chase a different kind of danger—design choices that feel more like tabletop play than polished prestige.
Oster says he’s excited about emergent design, and about tabletop D&D campaigns that go sideways after the party burns the starting tavern down.
“I was waxing nostalgic the other day, and describing playing D&D as a kid to somebody,” he says. “I liked it when it was weird and dangerous. You were talking about demon summoning and hell and the hierarchy of devils. and you didn’t want to tell too many people because they might get freaked out by it. It felt like you were in this little subsection of society. It’s just a little too mainstream and acceptable right now. I want to lean into something like that.”.
So the long chase that started with an original BioWare milestone didn’t end with resentment. It ended with a reminder—delivered in facts. timelines. and boardroom refusals—that making a sequel isn’t only about vision. Sometimes it comes down to who can afford to bet on it, and who gets tired of asking.
Oster’s final note about Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t bitterness. It’s a stubborn insistence that the door was open to others too.
“Hey, you guys had the same opportunities we had,” he says. “You just happened to have a bunch of capital behind you.”
Trent Oster BioWare Beamdog Baldur's Gate 3 Larian Studios Wizards of the Coast David Gaider Obsidian Cold West Siege of Dragonspear real-time with pause