Hello everyone!

I went to the reviews but they weren't helpful. I'm hoping to find legitimate points for or against the game. I just started and I think it's ok so far. Most of the positive reviews were about how much they loved the original IWD. One of them just said it was a great game. And for the negative reviews...there were four and two of them said they didn't even buy the game. One guy complained that you can't upgrade to the Enhanced Edition as if it were downloadable content from Xbox Live Arcade. The last one said there were a lot of bugs but didn't go into detail as to what those were. I would've taken his word for it but everything else in his review was absurd. Like saying that you can't use exploits anymore.

The biggest difference is that IWD:EE is based off the engine used in Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition.

IWD:EE includes all the classes and most of the spells from BG2. Needless to say, this affects game balance, as the classes and spells weren't balanced with Icewind Dale in mind. In particular, note that arcane casters are much more powerful thanks to spells like Project Image and Time Stop. Earlier, there's Melf's Minute Meteors. Scrolls are still scarce, which means that Sorcerers are even better, since they don't need to rely on finding scrolls to be useful. (The original didn't have Sorcerers in the first place.)

Another difference involves proficiencies. The original Icewind Dale grouped weapons into a smaller number of categories, while the EE divides them up into a larger number. I personally dislike this change (though supposedly the Baldur's Gate 2 Tweak Pack works on IWD:EE and can undo this change). Also, combat style proficiencies are in, as is true dual wielding. (One consequence: Rangers lose the ability to get an extra attack when not using a shield. In the original IWD, a low level Ranger/Cleric could attack twice per round with a Spiritual Hammer; this is no longer the cast.)

I can give two examples of exploits that were fixed (one of which could easily happen by accident in the original IWD). First, Dispel Magic on a shapechanged druid would, in the original IWD, dispel the shapechanged form's natural weapons, allowing the druid to use weapons while in the form of a bear or Wolf. Second, Emotion: Courage stacked in the original. With 5 casts, for example, you could give everyone +5 to hit, +15 damage per hit (yikes!), and +25 HP. In the Enhanced Edition, this doesn't work; each cast past the first will only reset the duration and restore 5 HP to affected characters. (Personally, I don't mind this spell not stacking, but some other spells (like Armor of Faith) I would prefer if they stacked.)

Edit: One other change (for the worse): Character Arbitration is no longer accessible in single player (except at the beginning when first creating your party). See the "Adding characters in Enhanced Edition" topic for a workaround.

I'd like to also add that it fixed the crashes I had with most Infinity Engine games.

Icewind Dale: EE is pretty much what the other EE should've been (well, they are now thanks to patches). It updates the game and adds new stuff (only a few previously unimplemented quests) and new functionalities while keeping the original content intact. Outside of the new cutscenes, I haven't seen the new content of Baldur's Gate EE, but I heard that it's a bit too radically different from Baldur's Gate and it clashes a bit.

To me, Icewind Dale EE showed that they did take the feedback from the previous ones into account and it's all the better for it.

Despite owning Icewind Dale, I'm willing to play the Enhanced Edition if there's a sale. I'm excited about some of the features such as dual-wielding weapons and expanded races.

The difficulty of the game has become really unbalanced, due to the new class kits, skills, items etc., - most of these new features are way too overpowered for the vanilla IWD campaing, therefore the game has become (even) easier, but at least now there is a lot more variety as far as the party and character generation is concerned, which, in my opinion, is a very important factor in a dungeon crawler, where you can create your party from scratch. There have been a few changes I noticed where the "devs" tried to increase the difficulty of a few battles and areas, but these, in my opinion, don't make too much of a difference.

Still, I enjoy the enhanced edition of IWD due to the simple fact that now I have a lot more party combinations to chose from. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it over the original, but I think this game benefited more from the "enhancements" - how I hate that word - than the Baldur's Gate games, as there was no additional story and character content of questionable quality added to it, simply because IWD is a traditional dungeon crawler and doesn't lend itself to that sort of content. I still think that adding more ways to customise the difficulty of the game would have been important. (Or better yet, making the whole battle system turn-based...unfortunately, due to the limitations of the Infinity Engine that would not have been possible.)

I can absolutely recommend the EE.

For me, its selling points compared to the vanilla game are:

* Native Mac and Linux version.

* Instant loading and saving - no longer waste time staring at load screens.

* Support for the cool engine features which previously only BG2 had but IWD didn't, in particular:
** dual-wielding weapons
** class kits (which can further specialize your character within a certain class)

* Support for modern screen resolutions. For the vanilla game you could install a mod to *sort of* get support for them, but is was a hack, and the UI didn't scale to it. EE features a proper scaling UI and worry-free widescreen support out of the box.

* Better accessibility, which is nice if you e.g. play in the living room and are sitting farther away from the screen:
** zoom support
** a font-size slider in the settings

* Added convenience - lets your avoid some repetitive clicking:
** quick-loot toolbar
** highlighting for scrolls (in stores or the inventory) which the active character hasn't learned yet

* Better modding support, as a result of which much more cool mods are available for EE than there were for vanilla. See here for a list of known compatible mods. For the vanilla game, there were only ever a handful of mods.

* Less hassle. The three mods which pretty much everyone installed on the vanilla game - "IWD Fix Pack", "Widescreen", "Unfinished Business" - are no longer needed for EE, as it already includes the improvements they added out of the box. So you don't actually *need* to install any mods if you don't want to, when you use the EE.

Downside: Rangers no longer get their extra attack when not using a shield. Also, the game isn't balanced with class kits in mind. There is one tweak for the original that lets you choose which otherwise random treasures you get. I have not seen it for the EE. The thing is, I actually don't like the fixpacks, as they "fix" things I would rather not have fixed, like spells stacking with themselves. (Armor of Faith is the real culprit here; I find that it needs to stack to be worthwhile, especially at lower levels. On the other hand, Emotion: Courage/Hope can be unbalancing if allowed to stack: 5 Emotion: Courage gives those affected +15 to damage rolls for a long duration.)

I don't see a problem there, as the kits come with both up-sides and down-sides, including the down-side that you can't use them together with multi-classing.

In the original IWD, multi-class chars (e.g. "Fighter/Thief") were king.
Now in the EE, thanks to kits, many single-class chars can compete with the multi-class ones.
I consider that an *improvement* to balance - it adds more viable party build choices.

It also adds some that may be a little *too* powerful in the context of Icewind Dale.

For example, the Undead Hunter: +3 to hit and damage against undead. In Baldur's Gate 2, this was an occasionally useful ability; it wouldn't come into play that often (though it was, of course, good when fighting vampires). In Icewind Dale, however, Undead are so common that Favored Enemy: Undead isn't an option for Rangers: You have to choose one of 3 categories of undead. As a result, the Undead Hunter is really good in IWD: EE. (That's even with level drain immunity being useless here.)

A few more examples to come.

Another good example, though it's technically a class rather than a kit: The Sorcerer.

In Icewind Dale, the availability of scrolls tends to be relatively limited, which results in arcane magic being less useful than in, say, Baldur's Gate. In particular, the game doesn't have enough scrolls to support more than 2 arcane casters, of which at most 1 could be a single-class mage.

Sorcerers, however, don't need scrolls, and can therefore get access to arcane spells before the developers intended.

Also of note is that the Enhanced Edition added most of the Baldur's Gate 2 spell list to the game, including such powerful spells as Chain Contingency and Time Stop. This makes arcane casters, particularly sorcerers, considerably more powerful at the highest levels. (Of course, there is one aspect that doesn't fit in this game; Icewind Dale mages get extra spells per day at high levels, but for Sorcerers they just copied the Baldur's Gate 2 progression, which was designed with HLAs in mind and stopped getting spells per day. This is one of the things I plan to mod if I ever get around to playing the game.)

Incidentally, Icewind Dale 2 has a similar issue: Scrolls are limited, so Sorcerers are considerably better than Wizards. (Of course, that game doesn't have Chain Contingency and Time Stop.)

Didn't the EE "fix" this by adding extra copies of some scrolls?

Can't remember for sure.

...at the expense of loosing most of the versatility a mage has.

And even though the addition of the Sorcerer class does indeed make it theoretically feasible to have more arcane spellcasters in your party than you previously could, I wouldn't actually want to do that, so I don't see it as anything "balance breaking".

With so many melee trash mobs to grind through and so many cool armors and weapons to use, you really want to have at least two (better three) heavily armored front-line warriors. And at least one Thief. And at least one divine spellcaster (ideally one for druid spells, and another one for priest spells). And even with multi-classing to cover those roles with fewer character, that doesn't leave much room for lots of arcane spellcasters - usually it ends up being just one-and-a-half of them ;), i.e. one Mage and one Bard.

Replacing the Mage with a Sorcerer in that scenario does give you earlier access to Fireball, but comes at the heavy price of never being able to learn many arcane spells at all with that party (because the Sorcerer can only pick so few of each level, and the Bard can't learn the high-level ones).

Not to mention that whereas a Mage can be multi or dual-classed (for example a Fighter2->Mage has probably 5 times the survivability of a pure Mage), the Sorcerer can't.

In other words, the Sorcerer is a real trade-off there compared to the Mage, not an obviously "better" or "unbalanced" choice.

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In any case, if you think the EE's enhancements make the game easier and you don't like that because you're looking for more challenge, the new "No Difficulty-Based XP Bonus" setting (added by v1.4 of the EE) might be for you. This way you can play the game at Insane difficulty, but only get the XP rewards of Normal difficulty.

If that's not challenging enough, I don't know what is... :P

Thanks for the debate... Clarified some things for me. As I was wondering this exact question. Love IWD, warts and all. Got the EE on sale and was pleased with ease of use and UI updates. Heard horrible things about BG2EE though.

My biggest negative is CHAR arbitration. Always liked starting out solo or with two man party. Fightr/Cleric or Tank plus support then maybe drop in a third utilty/AoE class. Will check out that workaround.

Basically interesting for trying out kits with an old favourite. Good Effort, bar minor niggles. Would dungeon crawl again.

Isn't the Linux version just the Windows binaries in a stand-alone WINE wrapper?

No, it's a true native source port!

If I remember correctly, I think Beamdog said they took the source code of the Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal engine, and replaced most of the operating-system interfacing code with something more modern in order to support their new scalable UI and run trouble-free on all modern Windows versions. (And then converted the Icewind Dale data files to fit that version of the engine.)

And since they went through that trouble anyway, they did the right thing and made it cross-platform as well!

If I recall right, it was because part of the original source code (I think it was the expansion) was missing and they had to re-code it from scratch. It turned out to be for the better.