Trent Oster

The other side was brutal. Think pink where there should be orange

Fun Fact. We made some T-shirts for the launch of Baldurs’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition. We had them printed and sent to the show. When they arrived the colours were so bad we decided to never use them. I use one of them as an evaporation cover for my heat-treating oil tank for knife making

We finally hung our signed Outer Worlds 2 poster in our hallway. It was a great experience working with Obsidian on such a fun game.

Odyssey of the Dragonlords: Remastered Edition An epic Greek-inspired 5E campaign updated for the 2024 rules. Challenge gods, titans, and fate itself.

You should jump on the Odyssey of the Dragonlords Kickstarter by former Bioware Lead Designer, James Ohlen. There are only two tiers of unlock left: www.kickstarter.com/projects/arc...

After my time in Cologne:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the wisdom to know the difference. And the confidence of a Cologne Uber driver”

I finally set MythForce to the price I think it should have launched at, $19.99 we set out to do a lot of things and some we did well, others, less so, but I think for a fun , multiplayer dungeon romp at this price it is a good value.

Cat looks great

What the hell is wrong with you? ;-)

Scouting out where in the office to hang our signed poster from Obsidian for Avowed. We were happy to work with their team on such a fun project

That was the idea.

He had a great arc. I think he was easy to sympathize with, for a monster.

With the recent chat with @davidgaider.bsky.social I did some digging. Here's a rough concept mock we did a long while back for a potential Planescape Sequel. (We were doing Illithid before they were cool)

While I do think capital is over-valued, capital goes away quickly when you make bad bets.

AAA right now is a bloodbath between ever-rising expectations and ever increasing dev costs. If you assume a 30% platform cost, a premium $60 game is at best, $40 a copy to the publisher. A $200M dev cost + $100M marketing title needs 7.5M units to break even. The risk is too great.

I think people just lie. During the Bioware heydays, you knew a Bioware game was going to cost double what we said and would take twice as long. We built a full projection for NWN, taking five years, Greg and Ray had us cut it to three for the pitch. We shipped it in five.

All the publishers want an almost complete game they can snag for $1-$2M. For all the talk of the "AA" space, there isn't anyone actually funding it. Maybe at some point Beamdog can go back to Unraveled or Cold West, but for the moment, they are buried and sadly, decaying from inattention

I had high hopes for both titles, but the challenges of building a new team, learning a new engine and finding funding were just too much. I'm actually the worst fund-raiser of all time. I have never successfully gotten funding for a game or company from anyone. All the things we shipped we paid for

The funding issue had a few faces, one was nobody wanted to spend their money to increase the value of an IP they didn't own. The second major issue was a perception that RPGs had to be massive cinematic things and you had to spend $100M to make them. The scope we were pitching at was in the $20-$30

At the gym, thinking about distilling my workout (and life) philosophy into a simple basis. It basically breaks down to “Hit the big stuff hard while you still have a steam”. I hit the biggest muscles (glutes/quads) first with squats. After that, chest or back, then calves and shoulders.

Beamdog Kitchen photo

The world needs more of this against Trump. Shut down his misdirection

Is it wrong I just looked at buying a domain: whatdumbshitdidtrumpdotoday.com? It suggested the .Today could be the suffix. I think it needs to be shorter. The downside is I'd feel like I had to keep up on his dumb shit.

Here is the first Bioware staff picture. I think this was taken in the summer of 1995, soon after we founded the company. Left to right: Brent Oster, Al Theriault, Rob Mackay, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, John Winski and me, Trent Oster.

Congratulations to Obsidian on the launch of #Avowed We at Beamdog we were happy to lend our strength on the oars to help on the game under your direction. Great team, great people makes for a fun game

Just a heads up, the NWN2 stuff isn’t us. We can’t answer any questions about it as we are not involved in the game.

THAC0 had a good run in the sun. I think it is where it needs to be

I have to say I’m not impressed with Canadian politicians rushing to throw Mexico under the bus with regards to Trump’s promised tariff threat on immigration.

Felt like I was missing out. Twitter was making me give up on social media as the pain / positive ratio was poor. This seemed like a new start

Sometimes the reason your old workstation will not boot is not immediately obvious. Sometimes a dead data drive is the cause.

Trent Oster - Video Game Credits - MobyGames Trent Oster has 51 credits on 18 games

Just starting to post over on this side of the interwebs. #GameDev I started typing up my history and got lazy, so here's what Mobygames had: I may have aged a bit in the 15 years since the picture they pulled. www.mobygames.com/person/52489...