Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition Review
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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.
