A team of modders has just released Icewind Dale 2: Enhanced Edition, a remastered version of the classic D&D RPG that offers modern quality-of-life features and a host of gameplay improvements that expand the original's content and cut back on some of its more tedious elements.
Developed over the course of years by a group of fans called the Red Chimera Group, Icewind Dale 2: Enhanced Edition, which you can download at that link, is a mod that slots right over an install of the original game. At its most basic, EE implements widescreen support, smoother screen scrolling, a quickloot option, and reduced loading times to make everything feel a bit more modern.
But if you want more substantial gameplay tweaks, you can optionally choose to install a veritable trove of additional content. As the mod team explains, this release "introduces more than 110 completely new spells, 170 new magic items and 30 new feats, and allows several of IWD2's NPCs to join the party," on top of hundreds of general changes to existing spells and items.
"This mod also fixes the major issues many players had with the original Icewind Dale 2," the devs explain. "You no longer have to solve tedious, cryptic puzzles to complete certain areas, enemies in Heart of Fury Mode are empowered in interesting ways rather than just having lots of HP, and you can revise the experience system so you won't get zero experience for killing enemies late in the game."
The original version of Icewind Dale 2 was released in 2002 as the final D&D game built in the Infinity Engine. Like the first Icewind Dale, it offered more combat-focused gameplay compared to the story-driven adventures of the Baldur's Gate games, but unlike any previous Infinity Engine title, it was based on the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset.
Several Infinity Engine classics, including Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and the first Icewind Dale, were remastered under the 'Enhanced Edition' banner by developer Beamdog, but the studio never got to IWD2. According to a 2017 Kotaku interview with Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, that's because the source code for the game was lost.
"We’ve searched all the archives we have access to, including all the data handed over to Wizards of the Coast from Atari and there is no source code for Icewind Dale 2," Oster said at the time. "We’ve reached out to our friends at Obsidian, as many of them were the development staff behind Icewind Dale II, and they do not have any source code. We’re stalled on the project without source and the project won’t move forward until we can find it. We’ve naturally moved on to other things until there is a change in the situation."
That fact just makes this fan-made remaster even more impressive. Baldur's Gate 3 and other modern greats are creating a whole new generation of CRPG fans, and it's good to see that they'll have a proper way to play IWD2 if they choose to revisit the classics of the genre.
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