kwerboom: I was wondering what the differences really were. If this is really all that was changed, then I will stay with what I have.
No, that's not all.
If bugfixes, cross-platform compatibility, and improved modding support (which re-invigorated the Infinity Engine modding community) doesn't interest you, then here a few more "quality of life" improvements that the EE games give you:
Scalable UI The original games were designed for screen resolutions from 640x480 to 800x600. (Support for 1024x768 in BG2 was considered highly experimental and could only be enabled from the separate Config.exe). Those resolutions are *tiny* compared to modern screens. There is a mod, called "Widescreen Mod", which allows playing the original games at higher resolutions, but that's only half the story - because it's just a hack to extend the viewport size and doesn't actually cause the UI to scale to it. So everything still looks tiny. In fact, many art assets - like IWD portraits - don't even
have hi-res versions in the original game data files.
For the EE games, Beamdog remastered some of the art assets (e.g. IWD portraits) from unreleased originals, and created a new, properly scaling UI designed for modern screen resolutions.
Scalable font The original games use a small pixmap font, which makes all text look jagged and tiny on modern screens. There are mods that replace it with a larger bitmap font, but like with the Widescreen mod that's a hack, and since the UI wasn't designed for that it causes its share of ugliness and problems (e.g. floating text appearing in the wrong place).
The new UI used by the EE games uses a scalable font instead, and has a font size slider in the settings menu.
Less limited weapon combos [2.0] Say you want a character to sometimes use a bow (which counts as a two-handed weapon), but other times fight with sword+shield. In the original games this is a hassle, because even though there are multiple weapon slots, they don't let you equip a shield while
any (even inactive) slot contains a two-handed weapon, and vice versa. So you have to do a 3-way switch where you first remove your two-handed weapon from the weapon slot and put it in your backpack, then move the shield from the backpack to the shield slot, and
then it lets you switch to the weapon+shield combo.
The EE engine fixed this limitations, and allows you to quickly switch between a TH weapon and weapon+shield combo.
Spell scroll highlighting Another example of something that is cumbersome in the original games, is going to a store that sells spell scrolls and trying to buy the spells which your wizard can learn but hasn't learned yet. Unless you have excellent memory, this involves lots of time and clicking to go back and forth between the store interface and you spell book.
In the EE games, scrolls (in a store and in your backpack) have a color-coded outline showing whether the currently selected character is allowed to learn that spell in principle, and whether they have already learned it.
Instant loading and saving In a time of game companies being ever more wasteful with system resources (looking at you, Unity games!), it's really nice to see that Beamdog's programmers put in effort to actually make the games more efficient. Not only can they handle greater numbers of characters on screen now without stuttering (which SoD made good use of), but the saving and loading times were reduced to near zero. Also, installing many mods no longer slows down the games nearly as much as it used to before the EE.
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[2.0] = Added in patch 2.0, so IWD:EE - which is still on patch 1.4 - doesn't have this yet, but BG:EE and BG2:EE do.
