Baldur’s Gate 3 is well on its way to early access, making it hard for any fan of the series to think about anything else. To help tide you over until the game is released, at least in early access, we’ve already provided you with a list of great mods for Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition. But we know that’s not enough, so here’s another list, this time of Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition mods, which will make your next campaign a little different and far deeper. Hopefully, combined this will all be enough to keep you happy until the third mainline release.
Make it look better
This first set of Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition mods are all about making the game look great on modern machines. Despite being a remastered version of the original, it still needs a bit of help to bring it up to standard.
BG2 EE Portraits
This mod adds loads of new portraits to use in the game. Some of them are NSFW, but you can pick and choose which ones you want, so there’s no need to have them all by default. They add a bit more detail to the standard portraits, and considering you’ll be staring at them for most of the game, they’re sorely needed.
Lore-Friendly Portraits
This mod is an addition — or alternative — to BG2 EE Portraits. It adds a collection of new portraits to the game that are lore friendly, meaning they fit in with those found in the game natively, and won’t stick out like a sore thumb like the obviously modded-in ones do.
Widescreen Mod
This is really a straightforward mod. It allows you you to play the game, and a number of others, at previously unsupported resolutions. It was built with windscreen monitors in mind, so it should make the game fill your screen, whatever you’re using. The only thing it can’t do is make it feel like you’re playing on an old CRT monitor again.
Improve the gameplay
Over the years there have been significant leaps and bounds in the realm of game design with ARPGs. Unfortunately, Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition was released way before all of these, and still uses features that were standard in its time. Luckily, there are some mods that can bring it up to the modern era (or as close as possible) in a few subtle ways, making it feel like you’re playing a game that’s half its age.
Tweaks Anthology
A number of fixes and improvements are present in Tweaks Anthology. Some of these spruce up the game’s engine to run as it was intended, which the game doesn’t as standard in some ways. Others are major requests from fans that never made it into BG2 EE. For example, there’s a Russian translation, expanded armor list, increased movement speed outside of combat, brand new items, and overall updates to every character in the game.
Sword Coast Stratagems
This mod is a beast that combines over 100 interconnected mini-mods to bolster gameplay in BG2 EE. The mod makes combat far more challenging, and is designed for those looking for something of a hardcore experience from their next campaign. It doesn’t necessarily make enemies harder with increased health and damage, but it does enhance their AI. Overall you should feel like you’re fighting a smarter enemy, one that’s closer to a real-life foe than you’d ever find in the base game.
Tactics Mod
This mod is another gameplay enhancer that will make BG2 EE a more challenging experience. It’s a collection that makes enemies harder to fight in a number of ways, and you can pick and choose just how hard they’re going to be. Where Sword Coast Stratagems is an across the board boost to enemies, this collection packs in smaller mods that focuses on individual encounters that fans will wish were a bit of a tougher fight in the moment.
Rogue Rebalancing
This mod is specifically for Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, an expansion pack for Baldur’s Gate 2 that’s packed in with BG2 EE. What the mod does is strive to bring Bards and Thieves closer to their pen and paper counterparts found in Dungeons and Dragons. While you can decide which parts of the mod you want to have active, we’d recommend enabling as much as you can. For one thing, the mod restores proper dual-wielding to these classes, and pushes their kits to the higher stat levels found in the pen and paper game. More accurate spell progression, and even a brand new encounter also form part of this mod, which has clearly been created by people who feel that their favorite classes were grossly underlooked in this’s expansion.
Create a deeper experience
The Baldur’s Gate series is full of epic quests to take on, and complex characters to meet. However, if you’re looking for an even deeper experience, something that will keep surprising you until the next game releases, then these are the mods that you need.
Ascension
This mod was actually designed by David Gaider, one of the writers for the Throne of Bhaal expansion. It fixes lots of small bugs, but the bigger upgrade it adds to your game is an entirely rewritten final chapter. Evidently, Gaider wasn’t happy with the final release, so he took it upon himself to create the ending he thought better fitted the add-on. There are also new powers to be found, additional interactions that weren’t in the original release, and expanded epilogues written by Gaider. This is definitely one of those mods that you should install, even if you don’t use any others, just to see what the intended ending for the expansion looked like.
Keto and Kelsey Of Pocket Plane
Download Link 1, Download Link 2
Keto and Kelsey of Pocket Plane are two must-have new NPCs for anyone who wants more from their next BG2 EE campaign. Keto is a musician who simply wants to make her way in the world, but she keeps skirting the doors of dungeons, getting into fights with untold armies of evil. Kelsey is a sorcerer and overall kind-hearted young man who also just wants to make his own way in the world.
Together, these new characters have thousands of new lines of dialogue, and will regularly interrupt you for banter and additional commentary that you’ll never get tired of. As far as companions go, they’re also great alternatives to some of the game’s standard offerings.
Dungeons-Be-Gone
This is a mod for anyone who has a dungeon, or several dungeons, that they hate fighting their way through. Some of them are just a chore, and playing games shouldn’t be a chore. Dungeons-Be-Gone adds a shortcut to all dungeons, and a helpful, fully-voiced NPC to guide you through those shortcuts.
We recommend using this mod with your own rule outside of the game. For example, for every dungeon you skip with a shortcut, you need to fight through the next two. Alternatively, skipping a dungeon may force your character to inexplicably kill someone they didn’t want to in a tavern. Using your imagination with this mod can make it feel a lot less like cheating.
NPC Strongholds
This mod is fairly simple. It allows you to gain a stronghold for an NPC as long as you have them in your party when you do the quest that leads to said stronghold. It fixes things up so that you should have the cleric you need — Anomen or Aerie — in your party when you first head to the Temple District to hear Gaal’s speech.
Those are our recommended mods for Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition. If you’re as desperate for Baldur’s Gate 3 as we are, these should go some way to helping you cope in the time we have left until the game launches in early access.
