Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition Review
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It was close to a year ago that Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was released by Overhaul Games and Beamdog. At the time, I covered the game and felt that while some of the new additions were nice, much of the new content paled in comparison to the original release's, and many of the new glitches introduced were a major black mark on the claims of a stabler, more user-friendly experience.
But, in that intervening time, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition has been improved quite a bit thanks to a steady stream of updates, and the developers have had many opportunities to learn from their mistakes with the original Enhanced Edition. Now, they've put forward Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, which is of course an updated re-release of Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and its expansion Throne of Bhaal. Is the new content worth playing? Are the bugs and glitches all ironed out? Is it worth its asking price? And perhaps most importantly, do fans of the original game need this new version?
The Classic Updated
Baldur's Gate II needs no introduction. Suffice it to say, in the 13 years since its release, it's become a classic CRPG, and for good reason - it's huge, expansive, deep, got a compelling story with memorable characters, great tactical combat, surprisingly varied and interesting quest design, and while not a perfect game by any means, it's still great fun. I'm happy to say that the original game is preserved - it's just as good as ever, and remains eminently playable and enjoyable, provided one doesn't mind reading the manual for a few minutes to come to grips with the AD&D ruleset.
What's new in this Enhanced Edition? It mostly boils down to, like Beamdog's work last year, technical updates, a few new features, and a slew of new content added on top of the original game. For the most part, the changes do not in any way detract from the original, which is something I unfortunately could not say about Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, which was riddled with far more significant bugs on release than the old version ever had.
One simply need go back to the original to see just how much the improvements help Baldur's Gate II. Sure, there's a few questionable features, like the ability to zoom the "camera" in, which I feel is simply not that useful and looks rather ugly thanks to the pixelated sprite scaling, but most of the features genuinely make the game more enjoyable. The hyper-fast saving and loading, the updated interface that shows more information without requiring the player to hop between sub-screens, the new quick loot UI, all of these really help make the game far more playable in their own small ways.
Unfortunately, there are still some glitches, and some are significant. Off the top of my head: AI scripts for party members are inconsistent and sometimes cause them to do unpredictable things; sometimes my orders to cast spells got "stuck" and caused my mage to simply stand ready to cast indefinitely; saving/loading causes the scaled enemy spawns in levels to simply vanish at times; and some random crashes, which happened more than just once or twice for me. Other players have also reported game-breaking issues on the game's official forum, but fortunately, I never experienced any myself directly. Most of the issues, though, are confined to the new content, which at times feels like it didn't get the proper play-testing it required, manifesting in the form of scripting bugs, dialogue selections that end conversations suddenly and prematurely, and so on; while it's not really game-breaking, it is somewhat disappointing.
New Heroes
The actual gameplay content that's been added takes the form of four "new" companion characters, each with their own quest-lines and special areas to explore. I say "new" because three of them are actually reappearing characters from the first Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, specifically the half-orc Blackguard, Dorn, the wild mage Neera, and the Sun Soul monk Rasaad. Personally, after their somewhat limp first outing, I wasn't too eager to see them again. However, with Baldur's Gate II being much more character-driven and featuring far more involved companion stories and quests, I feel they're a much more natural fit for the game than they were for the first Baldur's Gate.
The new character added to the mix is Hexxat, an evil-aligned female thief. Personally, I found her to be much more interesting and better-written than the other three. There's actually a pretty entertaining and well-guarded twist on her character that is revealed during her storyline, and it's nice to have an evil-aligned character who isn't a bloodthirsty lunatic, insane necromancer or self-centered jerk. While I always felt going good was a natural choice in Baldur's Gate II, with a character like Hexxat the argument for following an evil alignment is a bit more compelling.
As for their quests and stories themselves, after playing through all of them, I have to say that it's still something of a mixed bag, but overall the new content is a step up from the drab and uninteresting stuff found in the first game's Enhanced Edition. For starters, instead of one or two new rather humdrum and short areas added to the map, now each character has about double that number, and all of them feature more elaborate questlines. While still linear, the gameplay they offer is a lot stronger, often featuring more side-quests and multiple quest solutions (like hiring on allies to help with a tough fight, talking your way out of one, and so on). This is good stuff, and while not all quests are that interesting, the mere fact that even few are is still welcome.
When it comes to combat, much of the encounter design has been radically improved over the first game's re-release, and the challenge level has been upped significantly. It feels weird to say, but some of the most enjoyable, tactically demanding fights I had while playing through Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition were actually from the brand-new areas and quests. This is in stark contrast to the added combat in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, which was pitifully easy and just plain boring, with few real tactics required, so Beamdog have most definitely improved here.
I did say above that the new content is still a mixed bag, and there are definitely gripes to make. For example, Hexxat's character, while a worthy addition to the game, occupies probably the most dull of all the character storylines, and after her little twist there isn't much to keep up interest. Some of the side-quests are also rather weak - ones associated with Neera's story in particular, including hunting down stray cats in a forest, and searching crates for a little girl's lost brooch, are pretty much blatant filler, and aren't any more fun than they sound on paper.
I also feel that Beamdog's team lacks some of the class and charm in the writing department compared to millennium-era BioWare. I found that sometimes the tone and consistency was all over the place - lots of fourth-wall-breaking comments, strange anachronisms, humor awkwardly juxtaposed with more serious events, and so on. And, frankly, I despise Neera, whose character is not much more than a blatant Manic Pixie Dream Girl fan-service stereotype, and half of whose lines seem were written with the intent of starting new "go for the eyes!"-esque memes. It's not that the writing is bad, in fact, far from it, but it often doesn't fit with the original content as well as it should.
Last, it's worth noting that as far as presentation goes, the new content is once again a step up from Beamdog's previous work. The newly-designed areas are all sharper and more detailed than before, and the overall area design is more varied and elaborate to explore and examine. There's also a bit more variety in the voice acting, and far more lines are voiced than the last time around, perhaps a testament to a larger budget and more time spent in development.
There are, however, some odd rough edges - for example, I found an animated waterfall in one new area that was exceptionally low-resolution and ugly next to the terrain, and there are some pretty blurry textures seen from time to time despite the backgrounds being pre-rendered, making these new areas still stand out from the original game's. These issues aren't just visual too: in one area, I discovered several distinct characters within spitting distance of each other which were all obviously voiced by the same actress, with a few really phony accents to try to cover that up.
The Black Pits II: Gladiators of Thay
The other major addition to Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition comes in the form of Beamdog's follow-up to their original stand-alone module, The Black Pits. While I found the original to be a pretty bland combat arena grind with only a small dusting of story to break things up, Beamdog has made efforts to turn The Black Pits II into something that can stand up on its own better.
For the most part, I think Beamdog has succeeded. Although still a fairly simple tale - your party is once again kidnapped and forced to fight in an arena, with escape from its deadly enslavement the ultimate goal - there's a much larger retinue of characters to talk with, more interesting sub-plots, and a story that develops beyond the bare-bones as it goes on, even if ultimately it's still just an arena mode.
The gameplay in The Black Pits II has also been substantially improved. As an arena mode, I felt the original Black Pits was, frankly, a failure - most of its battles were pretty straightforward, repetitive and easy for experienced players. The Black Pits II improves substantially by throwing much tougher battles your way almost from the start. I found my party members dying readily even a couple of rounds in, and many of the enemy choices are designed to cause a lot of trouble, especially in combination with the different arena environments, which have little cover to hide behind, and no walls or doorways to serve as easy choke points. I could be wrong, but I think there are even custom AI scripts for the opponents you face, as I found my mages and archers often being aggressively targeted by stealthy assassins.
Really, there's not much to say - The Black Pits II is still an arena mode so by virtue of that is still limited to a handful of maps to play on, and its story is still ultimately just fluff to set up the fights, but that fluff is much more fleshed out, and those fights you do get into are actually a challenge at times. So in that respect, I can call The Black Pits II competent, and sometimes fairly entertaining, if somewhat unremarkable.
Closing Thoughts
Unlike the original Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, I am much more willing to recommend Beamdog's new Baldur's Gate II re-release to players. While there are some bugs and the new content still does not quite match what BioWare was producing in its prime, it's a much more solid package overall. After playing for a couple of weeks, I'm having trouble going back to the original, if nothing else for the technical features like the quick loot UI, the super-quick saving/loading, and the ability to play in windowed mode without requiring any third-party programs. But at the same time, is the new content excellent and must-play for most people? Probably not.
There's one more thing to consider - at $25 USD, Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition is now more than twice the price of the complete edition of the original release commonly available at web sites like GOG and GamersGate. At $20, that price seems pretty fair, but $25, while realistically not that much more money, still feels a bit hard to justify, especially if you have already played Baldur's Gate II before. There are plenty of excellent new RPGs out today that can easily be had for that price or even less, as well.
So, with all that said, my conclusions about Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition are probably not that surprising: the original game's still as good as ever, the new content is nice to have but isn't really necessary, the fixes and improvements are offset by the new bugs and crashes, and the price hard to justify paying for those who already own the game and are comfortable installing a few mods. Beamdog have won back some of my lost faith by bringing out a much more polished and higher-quality product this time around, but I still have my doubts whether the studio has it in itself to produce a game of its own at this rate, as seems to be the logical trajectory the studio's headed in. I suppose we'll find out in the coming months whether the team is content to keep re-releasing old Infinity Engine games, or ends up doing something new.
