New Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale patch fixes bugs, adds BroShep

Three character portraits added to Baldur's Gate

(Image credit: Beamdog)

Last year, Beamdog announced it was planning to update the enhanced editions of classic RPGs Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, and Icewind Dale on Steam. That patch has now gone live for all three games. Version 2.6 gives them 64-bit executables for better stability, fixes hundreds of bugs, improves pathfinding, adds more player-character portraits and voice options, and throws in several additional text localizations as well.

Multiplayer bugs—which made area names display incorrectly, messed with character importing and loaded incorrect stats for imported characters' familiars—have been fixed across all three alongside an overall improvement to multiplayer stability. The lists of individual fixes for each game, as well as repair work done on spell visuals, abilities, and achievements, are as long as a tarrasque. Here are the Baldur's Gate patch notes, Baldur's Gate 2 patch notes, and Icewind Dale patch notes.

Each game also gets a shared set of 11 new portraits for your player-character and seven new voice sets for them, including two by Mass Effect's Mark Meer. BroShep reprises his roles as Baeloth Barrityl (who runs the the Black Pits in Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition) and Alveus Malcanter (the world's longest-lived first-level wizard and host of the Icewind Dale survival videos on YouTube).

Beamdog notes that some quirks still remain, like the increased speed and damage from the Haste spell not appearing in the combat log even though it does actually have an effect, and an issue caused by the OpenAL audio interface: "If your game fails to launch, try reinstalling OpenAL— the installer "oalinst.exe" can be found in the root of the game install folder."

Meanwhile, Larian Studios' entry in the series Baldur's Gate 3 continues its journey through Early Access, and the developer does not plan to rush it.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.