Happy holiday season from Uni!
What better way to enjoy the holidays than to revisit a revised classic?
Baldur’s Gate II ate up a lot of my free time when I was a young teenager. I even had a few high school friendships blossom through shared stories and strategies from what certainly hits number one on my list of top ten PC RPGs of all time. The combat system was needlessly opaque (though this was more the fault of AD&D in general), it wasn’t particularly concerned with game balance, and some of the romances were a little shallow, but Baldur’s Gate II started something; it ushered in a new, story and character-driven approach to western RPGs that struck a chord with gamers everywhere. I could go on and on about the sense of scale and scope in this series, the endearing characters that still hold a special place in my heart, the strong voice acting and the daunting, diabolical villains, but this isn’t really about Baldur’s Gate II; we know that’s a good game. The question is, is the Enhanced Edition worthy of your time and money?
One of the biggest draws of BGEE was the prospect of having all the flexibility, kits and features of Baldur’s Gate II in the original game (though to be fair, modders had already accomplished this). Needless to say, Baldur’s Gate II already has all of the features they carried over into BGEE, so what exactly did they add to BGIIEE? Well, frankly, not a lot. The NPCs they added in BGEE make a return, and two out of three are quite strong as party members. They all have their own unique quest lines, and in at least two cases, romance options. The NPC quests include new areas to explore as well. Outside of that, there’s The Black Pits 2, a continuation of the pit fighting mini-game they added in BGEE, but it seems riddled with bugs that make it difficult to play at best. There’s also a ground loot window that you can scroll through to quickly pick up the choice morsels from the ground without tediously clicking individual body piles (my favourite new feature) and the multiplayer functionality has been improved as well. And… well, that’s it, actually. That’s what they want you to pay $25 for.
There are numerous reasons why this is a steep asking price, not the least of which is the fact that the majority of what they added is new NPCs, something which is available in droves of varying quality from the modding community. The loot window is excellent, but certainly not worth $25. The only thing that could redeem it is the multiplayer functionality, which having tested it a few times with friends now, I must say is leaps and bounds better than the original games. Games are now listed in a multiplayer lobby, which your friends can scroll through to find your game. You can set a password to restrict access, as well. It’s fast and it’s fairly easy, though it would be nice if we could use Beamdog user names and passwords and filter games by friend; the only holdups we had were when we couldn’t find the right game in the dozens of others that were up and running.
One of the things that particularly irked me about this enhanced edition is that some of the bugs present in the original game have carried over into the enhanced edition. The Shapeshifter Druid for example would be excellent, if it worked as intended, scaled up properly and were properly coded, but all of the bugs and mistakes that plagued the class have resurfaced here.
“Perhaps it is just really difficult to modify such a unique class,” you might think to yourself. If it is difficult though, modders already figured it out years ago; there’s a mod for the original BG2 that overhauled the Shapeshifter completely. That Beamdog didn’t bother to fix this or some of the other glaring issues with certain classes screams of lazy development and a cash-in mentality, which is what I’ve suspected Beamdog of harboring since the announcement of the first enhanced edition. Clearly, the thing Beamdog is most concerned with enhancing is their account balance.
Gripes aside, Baldur’s Gate II is a fantastic game and terribly fun, it’s just that the original game isn’t so easy to find anymore.
I would recommend Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition to people who don’t mind old-school graphics and who haven’t had the pleasure of playing the original, but veterans may find the offerings lacking here, especially if they don’t have friends who want to join in on the action. Needless to say, I’m having a blast with it, but that’s not really Beamdog’s doing… it was Bioware’s 13 years ago.
Uni
Renaissance Gamer 