Was announced on August 29th but saw nobody post about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w17vHsQz5oM

Never played this but have always wanted to. If you look at the names of the characters, they seem to be named after the GB staff.

http://icewinddale.com/ for more information.

Not sure how to feel about enhanced editions but as long as the old versions are up on GOG, I suppose they're fine and I guess they help to deal with optmisation problems for modern machines.

Footage of the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition had similarly named characters. I assume it's being done by the same developer?

Yeah Beamdog

I have both of those Baldur's Gate re-releases but haven't played more than a couple hours. I should really play those...

And much like the enhanced editions of Baldur's Gate, you can probably ignore this in favor of just buying the original on GOG and installing a handful of mods.

Hahaha thats cool, I had not noticed that at all.

As for enhanced edition stuff, I am all for it. There are a lot of old games out there that still are worth playing but are either difficult to obtain, hard to run properly, or aged poorly. If all it takes is a bit of polish graphically and maybe fixing up a few things like UI to make it playable today, then I think its totally worth the effort.

I've just started playing the enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate 2. Relaly enjoying it. Hopefully this edition of Icewind Dale turns out just as good.

Good pickup on the GB staff character names.

Alright, I might actually have to eat my words with this one. Adding in Baldur's Gate II-style kits is something I don't think fan mods have actually managed to do yet (feel free to correct me if this isn't the case), and that's sort of a big deal.

Or you could buy the enhanced addition for a few bucks more and not have to install a bunch of mods and maybe get some custom content that is not available in the standard version of the game? Meanwhile most mods also work with the EE and all of the "must haves" are basically baked into them. Maybe it is just me but I would much rather play the enhanced edition BG games than the standard then have to spend 3 hours modding them to get basically the same performance.

"Caravella: takes 2 acid damage from Ryckert."

I looked through the screenshots specifically to see if they'd updated for the 2014 rosters!

Unfortunately for Icewind Dale, there's just not as much that you can "enhance" about it since you create your own party. I'll probably play it because I never finished Icewind Dale myself, although hearing from my brother about some of the stupidly difficult later encounters makes me a little shy. Game still looks amazing though. It's weird how the Infinity Engine is still the most beautiful RPG engine (or maybe that's all down to the artists) to date.

Three hours is a DRASTIC overstatement. Holy shit.

From what people are saying the Enhanced version of BG and BG2 introduced a lot of new bugs.

I played a bit of IWD but never got into it just like the other games of that type. It is not easy to get into, one wrong move and you are dead. Coming from the Final Fantasy games where you have maybe 350HP at the start of the game and the enemies do 10-50 in damage to this where you have maybe 12HP and the enemies do 5-15 damage in a hit was too much for me. Not to mention being only able to use spells once per day instead of using MP or mana. I am sure it is great for hardcore D&D people but I've never liked those rules. Give me a mana bar and let me spam magic and drink a mana potion when I need more.

@karkarov: I'm guessing it takes 30 minutes at most to install what you need. It's not a convoluted process, you download the mods/patches/tweaks (all of which can be found together) and run them. As I said above, this game might be the exception to the rule given the inclusion of BG2 class kits, but in general these "enhanced editions" address issues that fan mods dealt with a decade ago.

The Icwind Dale games specifically look really beautiful. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the IWD games used matte paintings for the environments, as opposed to the Baldur's Gate games which had digital art for the backgrounds?

With regards to the enhanced editions, I've never encountered any new bugs, but really don't think they're worth it compared to just getting the originals on GOG. The new content they add in is pretty much trash anyway, and modding the originals is a really quick process anyway.

With that said, I do own the EE of the first one on my Nexus 7. I just wish they'd hurry up and get the second one on android.

@thomasnash: I did feel like the first Icewind Dale game looked amazing (post high-res patch, of course) in particular - at least from the little I've actually played of it, which amounted to the first few areas.

Icewind Dale 2 almost looks like it has a weird gritty filter applied to everything which I never liked. Otherwise the engine is clearly the best the series has ever offered, what with it being the last game to be released on that engine.

I've personally garnered a lot of enjoyment out of the Enhanced Editions. You might not have noticed as many bugs because I feel like the Android version released after many a patch, and I came into the EE for Baldur's Gate on the PC after a number of patches. I was early on BG2 EE, and that could definitely stand some polishing. It's the kind of broken scripting where you want to save often enough to roll back in case you fall victim to it. As someone who spent enough time with the original releases (and also owns most of the Infinity Engine games on both CD and digitally through GOG already), it's fine with me to put up with the bugs for a slightly tweaked experience with the game with new player character options, items, and NPCs/romances which are... if not spectacular, at least interesting and way better than any mod. All of that combined with the number of UI tweaks and I feel like the extra cash spent on the Enhanced Editions is totally worth it if you know you want to invest the time in those games.

I hope they don't add/remove content. Otherwise i'd just play the GOG version with mods.

I had the same reaction. That's sort of how BG1 was as well, but it was much worse here. I hear you're really supposed to minmax your starting party to succeed.

If they manage to re-implement multiplayer in this, I'm 100% in. My brother and I did a lot of Icewind Dale multiplayer back in the day.

That's fair I was exaggerating, but it does take more than 30 minutes of downloading and reading so you know you install the right version with the options you want. Much easier to just do the EE version either way, and again, the EE version has content you can't get in a mod. Like additional companions that don't totally suck.

The Icewind Dale games are dungeon crawlers. You are most definitely supposed to play it like a Min Maxer because the game was designed around the idea that you would play it that way. That said any "suggested" parties you see in game are legit and were used by the original devs to beat the game.