Now that Trent Oster and his team at Beamdog have finished enhancing Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II, they’re moving north up the Sword Coast for an enhanced edition of Icewind Dale, coming later this year to iOS, Android and PC.
While Black Isle Studios only published BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate games, 2000’s Icewind Dale was their baby completely — they developed and published it. And while it tends to get lost between Baldur’s spectacular bookends, it’s an incredibly solid game.
Beamdog will be giving Icewind Dale the full remaster treatment, adding a ton of new goodies to the mix. From the Baldur’s Gate forums:
Icewind Dale has been enhanced with new kits and character classes, dozens of new items and spells, and restored quest material cut from the original game. The redesigned user interface features Zoom capabilities and a Quickloot Bar, among numerous other improvements. Up to six players can simultaneously enjoy Icewind Dale with the new cross-platform multiplayer mode.
The Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition will retail for $US19.99 on PC. Preorders are available now, and a beta is expected to launch within the next month.
Comments
7 responses to “Now They’re Enhancing Icewind Dale, And It’s Coming Real Soon”
While I loved the Baldurs Gate series, playing Icewind Dale and its sequel always felt like a chore in comparison.
The reason being that I loved having a party of great characters in BG, but IWD has you create your entire party from scratch, and they are soulless empty shells.
Oddly, that whole thing about creating your whole party from scratch I’d have to say was my favorite part, but for the reason that I spent about 2 days writing pages and pages of backstory for my characters, and then I didnt get past maybe the first 10 minutes of the game cos I wanted to continue writing the backstories I started. I never returned to play…
I agree 100% I need my Viconia romance equivalent.
Normally I’d agree with you since I feel the same way about created vs fixed characters, but I really liked Icewind Dale a lot. Much more than original Baldur’s Gate (though BG2 is better). The story was more interesting and felt much more like a translation of the Pen & Paper D&D experience. Plus I never felt like my characters were soulless – on the contrary, the game shipped with an amazingly good set of voice lines and portraits (something none of the previous or subsequent games from Bioware or Black Isle managed) and I remember all of my party quite fondly. I ended up importing the IWD portraits and voices into IWD2 so I could re-build the same party to take through that.
I hope they do the Heart of Winter expansion and Icewind Dale 2 as well. Those are both excellent as well and IWD2 is a lot better than the first game too.
EDIT: Looks like this has Heart of Winter and the downloadable Trial of the Luremaster add-on included as well. Awesome.
Should be interesting if you can get 5 friends on once a week, have a co-op session with everyone having their own toon.
YAY!
I guess this pretty much confirms an Enhanced Edition for IWD2 as well (would be silly not to at this point), the question remains if inXile will let them do a EE for Planescape Torment.
I don’t think inXile holds the rights to Planescape Torment, pretty sure those remain with Wizards of the Coast or the publisher.
I recall reading something about it when they announced Tides of Numenera.
While I’ll be playing IWD:EE for sure, I’m still really waiting for PST:EE.
Will it be broken feeling like Baldurs where the first person you have to kill in the quest is OP and can oneshot you?
Nice! I’ll be all over this – got way more into IWD and IWD2 than Baldur’s 1/2 for some reason. Think it was more combat focused? Struggling to remember.
Never got Icewind Dale. Really wanted too get it from GoG eventually and mod it but told myself to actually play BG1 and 2EE first. This will make it harder to resist.
one step closer to that Planescape: Torment enhanced edition…