IWD:EE

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Yes it is actually happening :WOOT:

http://forum.baldursgate.com/categories/icewind-dale:-enhanced-edition


An ICEWIND DALE ENHANCED EDITION

(@Tal will there be a EE forum for IWD too?)

I preordered it since I'm a pretty big IWD fan.


Discuss please

 

When are they going to be available? I say a pre-order option but no date. I wish they would do a enhanced edition for the old Neverwinter games.

 

The number of new features seems pretty modest for $20, though I guess BG's EEs weren't much better in that regard. I'm curious about the restored content though, I wasn't aware that IWD had cut content (was it common knowledge?). I wasn't a big fan of the new areas in BG:EE as I thought they sort of clashed with the originals. Hopefully the restored material will blend in better.

I'm still happy that these are getting made though (I fully expect an IWD2:EE at this point), newer generations deserve to experience these great RPGs and I assume that EEs reach a broader audience than GOG's originals.

 

Cut content in BG2 was covered by the Unfinished Business mod, presumably this "restored content" is the IWD 1 equivalent of that.

 

The Quick Loot function is SO awesome, just tried it out in BG-EE
Can't wait to try it in IWD ...

 

This is the first Enhanced Edition I'm actually excited about, so I thought I'd drop back in at the Boards 'o Magick after many months of absence, to discuss it...

I didn't see the point of BGEE and BG2EE, since it looked like they mostly just added improvements that could already be added using mods.

But for IWDEE they appear to have done something more ambitious, namely porting the IWD content to (their improved build of) the BG2 engine. This gets us all the nice things that only the BG2 version of the Infinity engine supports, such as dual-wielding, more classes, class kits, better weapon proficiencies, and in theory even joinable NPCs.

This should also turn out to be great news for the (until now pretty scarce) IWD modding ecosystem, because unless Beamdog somehow screwed it up and added new incompatibilities, it shouldn't be too hard to make BG2EE mods work with IWDEE (think of mods that add joinable NPCs, or new kits, or spells, or better AI, etc.).
So IWD players will hopefully be able to benefit from the much more vibrant modding activity and expertise surrounding BG2.

Actually, DavidW's IWD-in-BG2 mod promised to do pretty much the same thing, but it got stuck in beta phase with many bugs (some of them game-breaking) and was never finished. It looks like Beamdog picked it up and finished it (or re-did it from scratch, who knows), and combined it with the improvements they already added to the BG2 engine for BG(2)EE.

All in all a good deal for us Icewind Dale fans, I think!

PS: I haven't pre-ordered it though, as I'm waiting for the Steam version in the (probably vain) hope that the word "Linux" below the Steam logo here is not there by mistake... I'm sure the win32 version will work on Linux using Wine, but having a native Linux version would be even sweeter!

 

I'm not in a huge rush to pick this up. I wasn't overly thrilled with the initial release of BGEE, and even though it got better, I don't have a ton of faith in Beamdog at this point.

And there's so much other good stuff coming out soon anyway. I've barely had time to touch D:OS, so my hands are pretty full.

On the other hand, it's been a very long time since I played IWD1, so this might be an excuse to eventually come back to it.

 

I hope they keep the bonus class abilities that classes received in HoW. For example evasion for thieves and better spell progressions and caster level for rangers and paladins. I do think they should go a step further and give some other bonuses such as possibly giving rangers evasion as well.

Combing those things and kits would be a dream.

They could also put new classes like monks and barbarians into IWD1 (and give those monks evasion they have it or can take it in every edition of D&D dang it).

 

This should prove an interesting exercise in balancing AD&D elements with 3.0. Combining kits with 3.0 abilities, more spells that scaled with caster level, some of the most powerful weapons in all the infinity engine games... They'd definitely need to boost the difficulty on most of the encounters.

 

It's the Mage encounters that I am intersted in. The BG2 engine had some nice mage fights. The Marilith should be an intersting encounter as well.

 

Yeah, I've had IWD UB out for a while. The nice thing is that we got a load of the original BIS documents and were able to refine the restorations even further.

I'm pretty happy with where we got IWD-in-BG2, especially v8, but there were always going to be things we could never do in the vBG2 engine. A lot of the niftier spells and items, or stuff like HoF mode or the optional 3e sneak attack, are simply not possible without source access.

The original IWD class abilities are there. Some of the kits had to be adjusted against these different class abilities.

You may be thinking of IWD2. IWD was 2e, just as BG/BG2.

 

The original IWD may have been 2E, but the expansions added in decidedly 3.0 elements. Spells that scaled with caster level (a lot more of them), 3.0 spells that would break BG2 system balance if they were added to that game (and vice versa), innate abilities like sneak attack/powerful shapeshift forms, etc. All IWD:HoW bards, for example, had access to IWD2 songs like War Chant of Sith. Will the BG2 Blade kit be getting these songs? How about the Jester? Will IWD thieves get lay traps? Will they get to keep abilities like Crippling Strike/Evasion which they get at level 10 from the expansions?
And so on.

I'm interested in which abilities/skills they decide to keep/discard or whether they decide to favor one particular version or the other.

 

Excited

I'm looking so much forward to "quick looting" those nasty orcs, goblins and trolls

Ohh I can't wait. I had hoped to be in the beta, but I signed up before i bought my android device ...

 

Like I said, it'll be like IWD. So you can toggle between the classic backstab or 3e sneak attack+crippling strike. Evasion and the other IWD class perks are in too. For balance reasons, these perks are not necessarily applied to the respective kits.

For example, bards and their awesome IWD song list. I'll just quote AlexT (aka aVENGER):

 

Interesting. It's promising that they've considered feat/ability balancing from the standpoint of specific kits. Perhaps they'll have more freedom to implement badly-needed improvements to certain BG2 kits now that they can also draw upon 3.0/IWD:HoW-specific perks.

I wonder how they plan to tackle spell balance and encounter difficulty scaling, or high level kit ability scaling. Among other things, with the addition of the sorcerer class they'll hopefully grant mages access to more spell scrolls.

 

Good point... In a game where good scrolls are as scarce as this, the Sorcerer class is likely way overpowered.

 

Will the old dale keeper work with the new edition or are they making one?

 

Good Question. My guess is that the EE Keeper will be used.