"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.
