BioWare co-founder sought Baldur's Gate 3 for years — then Larian made it

"We could not convince people to fund Baldur's Gate 3," Trent Oster says. For two decades other developers tried and failed to get a follow-up made: Black Isle applied the title to a doomed D&D project in the early noughties, and Obsidian later pursued a third-person, party-based RPG until Atari Europe's sale to Bandai Namco ended those talks.

Oster, a BioWare co-founder who worked on the 1997 original and directed Neverwinter Nights, carried the dream into Beamdog. The studio released Enhanced Editions of the classics and in 2016 put out Siege of Dragonspear, but the team suffered 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 recalled, saying the incident fractured the team and drove some out of the industry. Beamdog later recruited Dragon Age scribe David Gaider and proposed its own Baldur's Gate 3 to Wizards of the Coast.

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