Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition

Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition is a 2013 remaster of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000) and its expansion Throne of Bhaal (2001), developed by Overhaul Games — a division of Beamdog — and published by Atari. It released on PC and iOS on November 15, 2013, with Android following in 2014, and arrived on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in October 2019. It is the version of BG2 currently sold on all major storefronts and the practical default for new players.

The Enhanced Edition adds widescreen support, interface improvements, hundreds of bug fixes, four new companions, a standalone arena mode, and approximately 350,000 words of new dialogue. It does not change the original game’s story, quests, or existing companions. Whether the additions improve or merely extend the experience is the defining debate about the release, and the debate has not settled in the twelve years since launch.

Technical Specifications

What Changed: Technical Improvements

The technical overhaul addresses almost every practical complaint about running the 2000 original on contemporary hardware.

Widescreen support is native — the original game required a third-party widescreen mod to run at anything above 800×600, and that mod introduced its own issues. The Enhanced Edition supports modern display resolutions from launch and adds a zoom function that the original entirely lacked.

Performance during large encounters was a documented problem in the original: dragon fights and large-scale magical exchanges with many simultaneous effects caused stuttering on multiple hardware configurations regardless of raw power. The Beamdog engine builds addressed this, resulting in noticeably smoother performance during the game’s most demanding combat encounters.

Bug fixes extend into the hundreds — the result of Beamdog working through the original game’s known issues systematically and incorporating community-identified problems. The original shipped with a significant number of quest bugs, dialogue triggers that didn’t fire correctly, and items with broken properties; most of these are resolved in the Enhanced Edition.

Cross-platform saves allow the same playthrough to be continued across PC and mobile. Import from BG1: Enhanced Edition is seamless — saves from the first Enhanced Edition carry protagonist data forward in the same way as the original 1998-to-2000 import, with the additional benefit of retaining EE-specific data.

Interface improvements include a revised inventory layout, an updated HUD, and streamlined access to journal and character screens compared to the 2000 original.

The New Companions

The Enhanced Edition adds five recruitable characters to Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal. Three — Neera, Dorn, and Rasaad — were introduced in Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and return here with continuing questlines. Two — Hexxat and Wilson — are new to BG2EE.

Neera (wild mage) is an elven mage specialising in wild magic — a school with unpredictable, uncontrolled effects that can produce spectacular results or catastrophic failures at random. Her tone is comedic in a way that divides opinion; reviewers have described her voice and dialogue as “Whedon-esque,” which is either an asset or a significant annoyance depending on the player’s sensibility. Her quest involves a community of wild mages seeking refuge from the Red Wizards. She can be romanced by male protagonists.

Dorn Il-Khan (blackguard) is a half-orc who has made a pact with a demon in exchange for power, operating as an anti-paladin with access to dark magical abilities alongside heavy combat capability. He is generally considered the strongest of the EE companions narratively — complex without being inconsistent, and effective in evil party compositions. He can be romanced by protagonists of either gender.

Rasaad yn Bashir (Sun Soul monk) is a fighting monk whose questline deals with his brother’s corruption and death. He is mechanically undertuned for much of Shadows of Amn — monks require significant investment to reach their potential, and the available gear in earlier parts of the game doesn’t support the class well. His writing is the most divisive of the three returning companions; players who find his dialogue earnest appreciate it; those who find it preachy do not. He can be romanced by female protagonists.

Hexxat is a vampire thief who enters the party by killing and replacing an NPC named Renfeld, whose quest she absorbs. She cannot be in sunlight, requires a coffin in the party inventory for resting during the day, and her questline involves recovering artefacts stolen from a vampire lord. She is the most consistently criticised companion in the game’s history — community verdicts on her range from “mechanically weak for the content available” to “actively poor writing.” The Escapist’s review of the Enhanced Edition described the new companions as its main weakness; Steam and forum discussions on Hexxat specifically are among the most critical pieces of extended player writing attached to any individual NPC in the franchise. She can be romanced by female protagonists.

Wilson is a bear. He has no dialogue, no companion banter, and no personal quest. He is a functional combat companion with bear statistics. He is included as a minor comedy addition rather than a substantive character.

Black Pits 2: Gladiators of Thay

The Black Pits 2 is a standalone arena mode included with BG2EE, functioning as a sequel to The Black Pits in BG1EE. Players assemble a party and fight through waves of increasingly powerful enemies — mind flayers, githyanki, demiliches — in staged combat scenarios with no overworld travel. It is entirely separate from the main campaign and can be started independently.

Reception was mixed: players who enjoyed the challenge combat of high-level AD&D 2nd Edition encounters found it a useful and replayable addition; players looking for narrative content found it thin. It is not relevant to the main campaign experience.

The “Are the Enhanced Editions Bad?” Debate

The r/baldursgate thread “Are the BG1 & 2 Enhanced Editions bad?” is a recurring topic in the community, and the answer the thread consistently produces is: no, but with a specific caveat.

The technical improvements — widescreen, bug fixes, modern platform availability, performance — are unambiguously positive. The Enhanced Editions are the correct version for most players approaching these games in 2026, and the conventional wisdom in the community is to recommend them over the originals.

The caveat is the new companions. The community consensus, established in the years since release and not subsequently revised, is that the four EE companions are weaker than every original companion — weaker in writing, in integration with the existing cast, and in some cases in mechanical utility. The standard practical advice given to new players is to install the Enhanced Edition for its technical merits and treat the EE companions as optional content to engage with selectively or ignore. Hexxat is the companion most often specifically flagged as worth skipping.

This consensus exists alongside acknowledgment that “weaker than BG2’s original companions” is a very high bar. The original cast — Irenicus, Jaheira, Viconia, Edwin, Yoshimo, Minsc — sets a standard that most RPG companions in any game don’t reach. The EE companions being weaker than that cast does not make them objectively poor; it makes them conspicuously ordinary in a game that established the genre template for companion writing.

Modding: EE vs. Original

The BG modding community predates the Enhanced Edition by over a decade. The Infinity Engine modding scene — centred at the Gibberlings3 forums, among others — produced hundreds of content mods, fixpacks, and gameplay modifications for the original 2000 game across the years between its release and BG2EE’s launch.

The Enhanced Edition uses a modified version of the Infinity Engine that is not binary-compatible with mods written for the original. Some older mods require conversion or updated compatibility patches to run on BG2EE; others work as-is; some have not been updated and are only playable on the original. The Beamdog modding community and the classic modding community have largely consolidated around the Enhanced Edition in the years since 2013, and most actively-maintained mods now target BG2EE rather than the 2000 original. Nexus Mods hosts BG2EE-specific mod listings.

The 2024 Patch and GemRB

Beamdog released a substantial patch for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition in 2024 — the first major update in four years, noted by Rock Paper Shotgun as a welcome reappearance of support for games that had been in maintenance-only status. The patch addressed longstanding issues and compatibility problems.

In March 2026, GemRB — an open-source reimplementation of the Infinity Engine maintained by a volunteer community — released version 0.9.5, which added BG2EE to its list of fully supported titles. GemRB allows the game to be played on platforms and operating systems that the official build does not support, and its BG2EE compatibility represents a preservation milestone: the game can now run on hardware the original engine was never designed for, without requiring the Beamdog client.

Which Version to Play

For new players approaching Baldur’s Gate II in 2026, the Enhanced Edition is the default recommendation. The technical improvements are meaningful, the original is not commercially available on mainstream storefronts, and the new companions can be ignored without affecting the main campaign. The original BG2 card documents the game the Enhanced Edition is built on; this page documents what Beamdog added to it.