Icewind Dale 1 & 2 in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Trilogy

Greetings, all!

(This is tangentially related to IWD in ToEE.)

While IWD in ToEE has some content, many were disappointed it was never fully finished. However, since many people still enjoy playing the Icewind Dale games, I made this thread about being able to play Icewind Dale 1 & 2 in the Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Trilogy (EET). This means that as part of your BG adventuring, you can also visit the areas from IWD 1 & 2 and effectively play more than one Infinity Engine game in a campaign!

Note that for this, you MUST have installed Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Siege of Dragonspear, and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition. These can be from Steam, BeamDog, or GOG. (These are expected to work on Windows and may work on other platforms like Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, and consoles. No promises on compatibility with non-Windows platforms.)

Download Enhanced Edition Trilogy (EET)

Official EET Forum

Download IWD 1 in EET

Download IWD 2 in EET

Official IWD in EET Forum Thread (auto-translated from Russian to English)

Download the World Map mod for EET

Enjoy!

 

Interesting. Been a long while since I played the games, so I wonder how IWD2 would play out, especially with the different game editions.

 

As I understand it, the EET project is aimed to be much like the older BG BWS was for the continuity of the BG series?

@Endarire have you played the IWD2 part? A quick search shows it reported to have a few quest bugs, but playable as per vanilla subraces and items. No balance changes, though. Does it introduce any SRD 3.5 character stuff or does it remain in the 2nd edition environment of BG?

It reads to be quite good work with just a few bugs. The main issue looks to be that the character levels will be pretty high when IWD2 access is allowed (Copper Coronet = BG2); quite a bit of IWD2 is lower level. It would have the EE engine zoom and other good stuff, I assume.

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I think the IWD2EE mod project (mod of the original IWD2 game) is certainly worth a play. I did a bit of beta testing for it and imho it's pretty good. Lots of new and balance tweaks (mobs, classes, items, spells, AI, NPC companions), mostly aimed towards a SRD 3.5-ish experience. The end result is that you can just use the old version of IWD2 alone and don't need the many mods to improve the flaws, like before. Currently the main test focus is the possible companions.

It Installs in one easy componentized weidu and no EE version required.

You can probably post an access request on the forum:
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/79872/icewind-dale-2-enhanced-edition-is-almost-here

 

To clarify, all EET material is AD&D 2e only since it uses the BG engine which is based on AD&D 2e and NOT the 3.x Infinity Engine adaptation for IWDII.

There are some minor bugs that may require you to use the console to warp you out of, but those are rare based on reports.

I've not yet played IWD2 in EET. I only briefly tested IWD1 in EET to ensure it started, and I needed to console warp to IWD to reach Easthaven. Once there, I could proceed as normal with IWD.

There's a separate EET mod for IWDII subraces that doesn't require any IWD mods to be installed. Thus, you could play through BG with a party of Drow, Duergar, and Deep Gnomes if you wanted. (I tested subraces and found it was a spiffy alternative way to play!)

EET is not necessarily the same as BWS (Big World Setup). BWS was focused on being a centralized big mod wad while EET allows more compartmentalization. EET is more like an updated BGT (Baldur's Gate Trilogy) which combines BG1EE, Siege of Dragonspear (SoD), and BG2EE into one long campaign that can be further modded.

 

Thanks for the clarification. If/when I give this a try, I will try to enjoy the changes and challenges.

 

BITD - I played the original BG, IWD and IWD2.

Later there were a few mods for BG and I replayed, and then I played a heavily modded BG2.

But I never finished BG2. I lost interest in it.

I think I have all those old mods somewhere.

I remember the fun of determining the install order of all these standalone mods so they don't step on each other's toes and play nice with each other.

I know many have all be rebundled/repackaged together so there is less to worry about, but not all of them. and then they did most in the EE versions and whatnot.

 

I know what it's like to get into BG2 then never finish it. I got a significant ways into BG2 at least thrice while never finishing it, though in summer of 2016, I finally finished BG2 my first time and it was worth it. Alleluia!

 

I found this TXT file with this list for the BG2 mods that I played at that time:
1. SoA
2. ToB
3. ToB Patch
4. Baldurdash ToB Fixpack
5. Baldurdash ToB Text updater
6. Non-WeiDu mods (not sure what I installed at that time)
7. Ascension
8. Solaufein
9. Kelsey SoA
10.Kelsey ToB
11. Flirtpack
12. Bandterpack
13. Dungeon Be Gone
14: Any WeiDU-mod can be installed now (not sure which additional mods I did install at that time)

At some point in the past I thought I'd replay BG and BG2, and in that absence many more mods were created.

I recall that the EasyTuTu mod/conversion caught my eye. It's a conversion of BG that plays in the BG2 engine.

I found a folder on my drive with EasyTuTu and about 65 mods to be installed in this order (according to the document provided with EasyTuTu):
2A. EasyTutu_ToB
2b.1 WeiDU-Windows-210
2b.2 EasyTutuDegreenifier-v4
2b.3 EasyTutuNPCKits-v2
3.1 Tutufix_v18
4.2 Tutusounds_v4
4.3 TxtMusic_v7
4.4 HardTimes-v2
5.0 BW_Herbs
5.1 song_and_silence-v3
5.2 LostItems_vR2
6.1 bgqe-v4_1
6.2 tgc1e_bg1tutu
6.3 SirinesCall_v9
6.4 tsoaV1.4
6.5 1 BoneHill_v240
6.5 2 Bonehill_v245
7.1 BG1UB_v7
7.2 1 bg1npc-v17
7.2 2 bg1npcmusic-v5
7.3 XanBG2Voice_v2
7.4 XanBG1Friend_v5
7.5 coran_friendship-v2
8.1 MulgoreXaviaNPC_v5_BGT_TUTU
8.2 FinchNPCv3
8.3 IndiraNPC_v11
8.4 Murneth-v7
8.5 gavin-v3.1
8.6 WizWomJonTutu
8.7 AjantisBG1_v2_1
9.0 MoinesseAvatars-v2
9.1 1pp_v2.70_windows
9.2 bg1npc_portrait_pack-v2
9.3 plasmo_picks-v2
9.4 plasmobg1bg2-v2
9.5 JPSPortraits-v201
9.6 BGBGT_v1 (no fabio)
9.7 GTBGT_v3.1
9.8 ImprovedBAMs-v2
9.9 PortraitsAlternativosBG1V5
10.1 eSeries-v1.8
10.2 gMinion-v1.8
10.3 sgseries23
11.1 wildmage16
11.2 Orc Kit v1.0
11.4 Oversight-v12 (limit the install)
11.5 Sword_and_Fist-v3
11.6 Divine_Remix-v5
11.7 rttkitpack12
12.2 D0Tweak_v20 (limited install)
12.3 refinements_windows_3.20 (limited install)
12.4 iiItem(05)
12.5 iiProjectileR(08)
12.9 RR_V411
12.10 aTweaks_v251
12.11-1 fullplate-v2
12.11-2 ashesofembers_v27
12.12 BG2_Tweaks-v7
12.13 scs-v12
12.14 EasyTutuSpawnRandomizer-v3
12.15 DrizztIsNotStupid-Tutu-v2
12.16 shs_soundsets_v2
12.17 BP_BGT_Worldmap_v7_1
12.18 BoneHill_WM_v7 update
13.1 TutuGUIv18
13.2 widescreen-v2.1

So I collected all these mods at that time, but i never bothered to install them.

There is a lot of dust on these files on my drive

 

The reason I never got into BGEE was that I had a BWS installation with ~175 mods installed (most of the ones I liked and a few of them were on your list). Amazingly without game-breaking bugs. This was before most of these were adapted for the EE versions, which took a few years to see some of these cross-over.

The biggest challenge was getting all the BWS install stuff in the right order for a relatively bug-free install. I don't think I'd have the patience to figure that out today - It was a bit of work.

I only completed one full game of BG->BG2 final with most sidequests + extra mod adventures once. The SCS + Ascension + Revised Battles + a few other difficulty mods probably made it around as challenging as EE LOB mode aims to be. It certainly provided a lot of extra hours of play.

Ofc, some of the mods can be too generous for items ...so I had to avoid using anything too silly. I really only wanted the extra adventures.

However, presently - I predict that EE has most everything adapted and many more recent QOL and adventure mods. And the OP thread points towards the similar concept in EE.

 

Yeah, I was out of that scene well before EE and EET were even conceived.

These days, that is the way to go.