Recommended reading

A major update for the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale enhanced editions is in beta

News
By published

Beamdog wants your help testing 2.6.

(Image credit: Beamdog)

It's been years since Beamdog released their enhanced editions of the original Baldur's Gate games and Icewind Dale, but the studio has announced it is planning to update them, with a "BIG 2.6 Patch" for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition in the works. The patch notes include plenty of fixes for the sequel, and Icewind Dale as well.

The highlights of version 2.6 will be a shift to 64-bit executables, "hundreds of bug fixes including many spell fixes", improvements to pathfinding and multiplayer stability, the addition of the Adventurers of Neverwinter portraits to all three games, and French text localization for Baldur's Gate 2.

Better pathfinding will be a blessing if you ever had your heroes get stuck on each other in combat, or noticed how frequently they went the long way around as soon as you pressed spacebar to unpause. The list of fixes is too long to repost here, but includes plenty of charming specifics like "Drizzt will now properly acknowledge the player's help in the gnoll ambush" and "Fixed a crash when using Polymorph Self to become a brown bear if the record screen was opened."

Beamdog wants players to test out the beta of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition version 2.6, but only a bit. If you've got it on Steam you can opt into the Road to 2.6 beta in Properties > Betas, but at the moment the only feedback the studio is looking for is whether the game launches and saves properly. If you feel like helping out, test it and let Beamdog know on either the Beamdog forum or the Steam forum.

Meanwhile, here's everything we know about Baldur's Gate 3.

Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.