Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is a remastered version of the original Baldur’s Gate combined with its expansion Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast. Enhancements to the original games include cross-platform multiplayer, matchmaking functionality, support for higher resolutions and different viewing modes such as widescreen. The mobile versions have touch controls with multitouch gestures, pinching to zoom and swipes to flip between tabs, along with the text in a larger font. It also incorporates improvements introduced in the sequel Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn and its expansion packs, adding classes, class kits and subraces that were previously not available in the original game. The developer lists over 400 improvements over the original game, including cleaned up code.
This edition adds a new adventure called The Black Pits. It is completely separated from the main game and is played with a new party. The player may use the provided six characters (including pre-defined behaviour scripts) or create them from scratch. The party was captured by the Drow Baeloth who opened up a fighting area, the Black Pits, in the Underdark. Baeloth tries to use them as cannon fodder and so the heroes have to survive several arena fights. Between fights, the player can use reward money to buy additional equipment from merchants.
There are also three new NPC characters that can join the party: the monk Rasaad yn Bashir, the wild mage Neera and the Blackguard (a new class) Dorn II-Khan. Each character has its own, additional quest line and (in the case of of Neera and Rasaad) also a new area. Through a patch, the developers later introduced the sorcerer Baeloth, antagonist of the Black Pits adventure, as fourth new NPC. However, he does not have any new content except dialogue. The original cinematics are replaced by new, hand-drawn cinematics directed by Nat Jones. There is also a new collection of player character voice sets. This new version supports downloadable content, it is opened up for modding and it incorporates an autoupdate function.
The GOG.com version of this release includes a redeemable key for Baldur’s Gate: The Original Saga, which it replaced on the storefront.
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