Fewer bugs and more Shepard’s voice: Major patch released for remasters Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II and Icewind Dale
Beamdog has announced a major patch for the extended editions of Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, and Icewind Dale, as well as the Siege of Dragonspear add-on for the first of these games. The developers removed support for 32-bit OS but added new sound and fixed many bugs.
Major changes:
- improved support for 64-bit OS, 32-bit OS is no longer supported;
- Added seven sets of voiced lines for characters. Alveus Malcanter and Baeloth Barrityl are again played by Mark Meer, best known as Captain Shepard from Mass Effect;
- added 11 new character portraits;
- fixed hundreds of bugs, including those related to spells, skills, items, import of characters, and cutscenes on the engine;
- an improved pathfinding system (party movement and navigation);
- there is support for new languages.
The developers also slightly improved the multiplayer: they added a hotkey for chat, fixed the display of location names in save files and game time, solved the problem of inability to connect under some circumstances, eliminate errors that led to crashes, as well as related to host reboots.
The complete changelog can be found here.
The creators noted that crossplay between PC and mobile platforms would become available only after patch 2.6 on iOS and Android. They also reported that they were aware of an OpenAL-related problem with the launch of games (it is advised to reinstall it), a delay in online multiplayer, and some other errors (for example, doubling the speed/damage from Haste spell is not reflected in the combat log, although the skill itself works ). The remaining bugs were promised to be fixed in future updates.
Remasters of classic RPGs were developed by Overhaul Games and released by Beamdog, founded by the BioWare natives, between 2012 and 2016. Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition was released in 2017, and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition in 2018. All games are available on PC (Windows, Linux, and macOS), iOS, Android, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
This month, Beamdog announced a game under new intellectual property, its second original project after Siege of Dragonspear. Meanwhile, Larian Studios continues to release updates for Baldur’s Gate 3, which is in Early Access.
