Hindsight is always 20/20, and it's hard to believe now, but once upon a time, funding Baldur's Gate 3 was a big ask. A team led by one of the developers on the first one tried to secure funding for the threequel but couldn't land a pitch, which led Larian Studios to eventually get the gig.
See, the first two Baldur's Gate games were made by BioWare, of Mass Effect fame. For a long time, the series was a duology with expansion packs. After Trent Oster, a co-founder of BioWare, left and started a new company, Beamdog, he started vying to make another installment, getting only incredulity in response.
"All the companies out there were like, 'It's a single-player 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?'" he recalls, to PCGamer.
His team's vision was quite different to what Larian put out, and considerably cheaper overall. "Our Baldur's Gate 3 wasn't as 'big picture' as what Larian pitched. Obviously, we were doing it at a much smaller scope," Oster says. "It wasn't going to be a $100 million game. I think we were pitching it in the $20 million range."
Even having David Gaider, the creator of Dragon Age, on board didn't help things. Beamdog did win the consolation prize of publishing the Enhanced Editions of the original Baldur's Gate games, versions that have become the definitive way to go back to those RPGs. Oster points out that the process hasn't gotten much easier in the wake of Larian's success with Baldur's Gate 3, because the goalposts have simply moved.
"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.'" he points out. "You're like, 'Yeah, I'm not sure about that.'"
