They did not simply apply an already existing widescreen mod.

I game on a 13" laptop with a 1080P display. Using the existing widescreen mod to play the original game at 1920x1080 resulted in an interface with buttons that were millimeters in size. Largely unplayable. So the only thing I could do using the already existing widescreen mod was play with the resolutions until I found one that had a usable button size, and the least amount of fuzziness from using a non-native resolution. Hardly an ideal situation. The EE interface is a fully scalable interface that works perfectly, and looks great at 1920x1080 on my 13" screen.

There are other tweaks and additions to the interface that I like as well that, to the best of my knowledge, were not available in any mod.

They alse released all of the EE games natively on Linux. Yeah, gemRB kind of did the same thing, but it isn't feature complete for all games, and I was still stuck with the widescreen mod / resolution problems.

The vast majority of th vitriol towards Beamdog is deserved. Yeah, their added content isn't great. Yeah, they're horrible at communication. Yeah, they overcharge for what the products is. Yeah, they were involved in removing the originals from the store. Blah, blah, blah.

But give credit where credit is due, they didn't simply package up some pre-exising mods with the original game, and sell that.

[EDIT] It would be nice if we could all just get over the Beamdog thing, and not have Every. Single. Thread. that mentions the EE versions devolve into a Beamdog Bashing session. I'm as guilty of this as most people. I'm going to try very hard in the future to avoid falling into this trap again.[/EDIT]

To my mind there was nothing wrong with what we had originally, worked fine for decades, Beamdog did --nothing-- to improve that, but doubled the price. Therefore I don't have any credit to give them. If anything, at release they made an inferior product (with all the bugs that were introduced and dodgy additional content) and doubled the price. Defend that as long as you like, I don't care, nor will I care when they do the same with NWN or any other game. It isn't me paying twice as much.

Just to mention and explain, rumor is they lost (or don;t have access) to the source code.

http://www.pcgamer.com/icewind-dale-2-cant-be-enhanced-because-the-source-code-is-lost/

I;m sure folks in this thread are aware of that but the original poster may not be.

I sometimes get stuck on character creation. I call it creation paralysis. There'd be something I wouldn't like about the character I just made. It could be the race, the stats, the class, or the little backstory I wrote for him. Sometimes I would spend 1 or 2 hours on the same character slot. I have this problem with Icewind Dale but not Baldur's Gate.