Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

Im 48, when Baldur's Gate came out I was in awe. I still remember playing for hours and hours neglecting sleep and food, just to see what was down the next road. Graphics are not what makes a game like this great. This game will enthrall you with its story line, humor, simple understandable progression........and the need to know what is next. I highly recommend playing BG1 as it is then BG2 as it is. THEN you MUST wonder over to the Gibberlings Three website and learn how to add the "Mega Mod", using "Big World Set-Up". This game with the Mods makes it so unbelievably addicting and adds so much content it literally quadruples in size and feels like your playing a brand new game. Im not going to sit and tell you it is easy as one, two, three....to add the Mega Mod, but it is well worth the effort and the Modding Community is always quick to respond to the forums. My personal Mega Mod Install took about 12 hours just to install, but much of it is, set it up go to sleep and do it again. You start with a fresh install of BG1 and BG2 "EE". Then you run the Big World Set Up, this tool will allow you to check templets of existing "Builds" or you can check on or off Mods you want or dont want. It then downloads them for you, this part took me about 2-4 hours.....the tool actually checks all the different websites to make sure the download is still available. Once they are all downloaded it actually checks to see if mods are not compatible with each other, so you can easily boot one before installation. Then it will install them with took me about 6-10 hours. The Mega Mod basically combines BG1 and BG2, all expansions, and adds another whopping 10 huge expansions, 30 or so joinable NPCs with dialog the interacts with existing Bio-Ware NPC's, 100's of new monsters, weapons, and Items, 100-150 side quests, 50 or so new areas, new portraits, ability to dye clothing, new spells, new summons, pets, thousands of new emerging conversations, a lot of humor, adult content....ect...too much to list. New classes and races.... The best part of playing the Mega Mod is it's replay ability. The BG world is transformed into this immense world where you can wonder the same roads, cities, and towns and find new things all the time, with a sense of freedom and not being tied down and railroaded constantly. As far as the Enhanced Edition, I like it. The graphics look a little more cartoonish, but not in a bad way, in a different way. The ability to zoom using the mouse wheel is awesome, zoom out for ranged melee and zoom in when its close combat. Some new graphics added something different, but again it is the BG story and characters you meet that really make this game epic.

Just an incredible work by Beamdog!

If you want this game try to find the original version not the enhanced. The enhanced game all looks horrible. How did this happen? There is no detail on the characters they’re just colors. Looks like a Monet painting. No detail at all. If I had known it looked like this I wouldn’t have bought it even for nine dollars.

Works perfekt, last Update fix a lot! Now, Aug. 2021, i can truely recommand this game to everyone. Bad reviews from the past are now wrong!

Instead of describing the merits of this superb classic, I wanted to put together a short how-to on an alternative way to get this game running under Arch Linux. This is because I had trouble getting the native Linux version to run well. As such, I experimented with another method. Here are the basic steps: 1. Download the Windows installer and .bin file from the gog.com website. 2. Enable [multilib] repo (look this up if you don't know how to do this.) sudo pacman -Syu 3. Install the following packages: sudo pacman -S playonlinux lib32-openal lib32-mpg123 lib32-gnutls pulseaudio lib32-pulseaudio pulseaudio-alsa 4. Start PlayOnLinux Go to "Install a program" Select "Install a non-listed program" Choose defaults through the wizard Call the virtual drive "BG2_EE" (doesn't really matter) If prompted, let PoL install Mono and Gecko. Select installer (setup_baldurs_gate_ii_-_enhanced_edition_2.3.67.3_(hotfix)_(10672).exe) Install normally, like in Windows. DO NOT LAUNCH the game yet. Select a shortcut to "Baldur.exe" - call it "Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition" Select "I don't want to make another shortcut" to finish the install wizard. That's it! Launch it either from PoL or your desktop. P.S. I'd also suggest running the game in Windowed mode; I've noticed that when I alt-tab out of full screen the game crashes. Not sure if this will happen for everyone though. Hope this helps somebody!