Earlier than releasing Saturday morning cartoon roguelike Mythforce, developer Beamdog made its identify remastering BioWare and Black Isle RPGs just like the OG Baldur’s Gates. However there was at all times one which obtained away: Icewind Dale 2. Although an official remaster stays inconceivable for causes I will get to, modding group Crimson Chimera has produced their very own tackle an Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Version.
Again in 2014, Beamdog CEO Trent Oster (previously of BioWare) claimed that “nightmares abound ” in remastering Icewind Dale 2 on the corporate’s Infinity Plus engine, and in 2017 he dominated it out fully.
Someplace alongside the road, within the nice morass of Interaction shuttering and the rights shuffling between Atari and Wizards of the Coast, Icewind Dale 2’s supply code simply slipped away. Possibly it is nonetheless on some dusty outdated Western Digital onerous disk in a submitting cupboard in Irvine, however barring a thrift store miracle, it appears gone for good.
Enter the Crimson Chimera Group, whose identify seems like one of many firms that saved hiring me in Armored Core 6. Their undertaking is just not an Infinity Plus engine conversion just like the official Beamdog EEs (that’d require the supply code). As an alternative, it introduces quite a few high quality of life modifications, 110 new spells, 170 new magic gadgets, 30 new feats, makes varied NPCs recruitable in your celebration, and bundles in a widescreen patch for good measure.
Setup is straightforward—simply copying the mod recordsdata to your Icewind Dale 2 set up listing and operating setup-iw2ee.exe. Much like different 2.5D RPGs with pre-rendered backgrounds of the period, you do not need to set the decision too excessive, as the sport display screen and UI will simply zoom out to accommodate, making the whole lot too small to parse—1280×720 is an effective candy spot for contemporary 16:9 displays.
As a notice, the Crimson Chimera Group does point out IW2EE turning up antivirus false positives, and I skilled this myself. I do not imagine that this multi-year effort was all a ploy to focus on hapless CRPG lovers with a easy trojan, although, and Beamdog itself has highlighted the team’s work. We have additionally run into comparable antivirus false positives with different CRPG mod tasks just like the Arcanum Multiverse Version.
Finally, that is the perfect Icewind Dale 2 Enhanced Version we may hope for, except after all a former Black Isle hand miraculously finds that supply code rolling round within the footwells of their automotive. It is at all times a great time to revisit the Infinity Engine classics, doubly so if this banner 12 months for RPGs has put The Starvation in you.