[Gogan]

One of the devs explains the rationale on his blog:

http://www.lar.net/2015/05/15/enhanced-edition/

When we shipped D:OS my initial feeling was – that’s it, I never want to see D:OS again after having risked pretty much everything for it and having woken up with the monster it is for years. But then the feedback came in together with criticism I thought was correct, and I started wondering what it’d take to fix it. And I wasn’t alone. Most in our team had the same feeling and wanted to improve things further.

And so we started, first with small things intended to be included in the N-th patch, but soon with more drastic things that couldn’t be included that easily. Then, even more drastic things made it to our tasklist that conflicted with the “patch protocol”, a series of rules that ensure story changes don’t break savegame compatibility and would therefore only be present in new games.

When the UI, controller and split-screen experiments looked like they were going to be succesful, it almost became a no-brainer that we’d apply our re-engineering skills to the entire game. And so we did.

This caused a stream of new problems of course but what would life be without problems

One of our biggest issues was that we suddenly had two games to maintain on PC. One was singlethreaded, the other multithreaded. One was based on DirectX 11, the other on DirectX 9. One had limited camera rotation allowing for certain pieces of level design to be incomplete, the other a 360 degree camera. One was live, the other wasn’t etc…

It quickly became impossible to do things on both games simultanously as the changes become bigger and bigger, and so at some point we had to make a choice. We decided to do only the really necessary things on D:OS and focus all of our creative energy on the Enhanced Edition.