Baldur's Gate II -- Enhanced Edition - Review

Thirteen years may have passed since the original release of Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, but I still remember pulling out the 263-page user's manual, feeling my eyes widen in intimidation at stats like “THAC0,” and chucking it to the side and jumping in without it. I don't regret it. Then, as now, Baldur's Gate II's stats will lead you down countless labyrinthine passageways if you let them, but there’s something ingenious about a game that uses an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons ruleset and still gives you at least a fighting chance of survival. In this new Enhanced Edition, Beamdog's clearly learned some lessons from its first attempt at enhancing the franchise last year, and its new content and built-in tweaks and conveniences render it a generally satisfying ride for newcomers.

A most peculiar prison.

BG2EE even looks like the 2000 version, down to the cutscenes (which were sadly replaced in last year's Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition). Booting up the original reveals the extent of the work Beamdog has done here, as it was designed in the days when we drooled over resolutions in the neighborhood of 800x600. With the Enhanced Edition, however, BioWare's classic runs comfortably at today's resolutions, and supports the welcome ability to zoom in and out as you wish. Though the resulting pixelation from zooming serves as a brutal reminder of why BioWare originally intended to keep the camera fixed, the environmental visuals have held up well over the years.

Numerous other tweaks abound. No longer do you need to hit Escape every time you wish to save; a new quicksave option allows you to prepare for foul ups without interrupting the pace of the action. Elsewhere, a new help menu provides a smidge of guidance for players who don't have the convenience of the aforementioned instructional tome, and a quick-loot option avoids the old hassle of endlessly clicking the screen to collect the spoils of battle. Beamdog also updated the Black Pits addition they designed for the first enhanced edition, which allows new players a way to just kill bad guys without worrying about the story. It still amounts to little more than a straightforward arena mode, but the enemies seem more challenging now and I once again found it useful as a makeshift tutorial for controlling the six members of my party in the main game.

Convenient additions all, but on its own it’s not enough for veterans to justify spending around double the cost of the original version (as found on vendors such as GOG.com), where a decade plus of mods and patches have already corrected many of its shortcomings. Instead, the real appeal of Beamdog's version for newcomers lies in the several hours' worth of story delivered through four new characters.

What lurks beneath the surface?

Three of them – the annoying wild mage Neera, the monk Rasaad yn Bashir, and the brooding half-orc Dorn Il Khan – reprise their roles from Beamdog's enhanced edition for the first Baldur's Gate, and the sequel's expanded abilities make them more immediately enjoyable than before. In the first outing, many of their adventures seemed brief, uninspired and even forced, but here each of their storylines span multiple zones and offer a handful of different resolutions.The content's stronger, too. Battles in the new characters' questlines seemed uninspired when they appeared last year, but here they deliver some of Baldur's Gate II's most consistently challenging content.

Enhanced Edition also throws a new evil-aligned female thief named Hexxat into the mix. She's one of the best reasons to experience BGII:EE, particularly since her well-written story arc and its twist provide a compelling reason to walk on the dark side. Hexxat also brings with her the possibility of a same-sex romance, and indeed, Beamdog took a bold step here in restricting the relationship to female characters. Already modders are clamoring for a way to make her questline available to males, but it's nice for female characters to have a same-sex option aside from Anomen after all these years. This wealth of new story content is where Baldur's Gate II lives up to its "enhanced" moniker the most, and it's all handled so well that players approaching it for the first time likely won't be able to tell where the old game ends and the new content begins.

The beautiful architecture looks better than ever.

Save, that is, for the bugs that pop up during these new missions. Hexxat and Dorn's quests seemed particularly glitchy, to the point that I took to making special saves before following their questlines in case I encountered missed triggers or noninteractive quest objects that a reload usually fixed. Actual progression roadblocks aside, the rough quality of some of the new content even shows up in low-resolution textures in a few new zones and occasional typos in the quest dialogue.

Considering the hundreds of hours' worth of content already in Baldur's Gate II, however, these are relatively brief intrusions in an experience that still manages to hold its own despite the widespread adoption of its model by numerous RPGs in the intervening years. That's also true of the equally impressive Throne of Bhaal expansion, which is included with the package. The story gripped me as much on this playthrough as it did the first time around thanks to the voice acting, which has lost none of its potency.

Old-school RPG bliss.