Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

A recommendation to everybody who likes D&D and is interested in the lore of the forgotten realms. The first few hours are pretty annoying, and the game becomes much more enjoyable from act 3 onwards. In general, the second game is much better, though. I can't say anything about how it compares to the original version, though.

I don't really come at this with some sort of agenda-laden comparison to the old disks. I actually owned two sets of disks (the six disk and the two disk versions). I loved the game. But I had not had those out in years, and was pleasantly surprised to find the EE "no disk" version. I found the EE version to be a completely more convenient way to play the game. I do think some of the new NPCs were a little hamhanded, but not in a way that detracted from the game experience. All in all, it was a good way to experience a somewhat updated version of the game I have loved for years. As to the game itself, what can you say? It was a quantum leap over the beloved Gold Box games that I believe stands the test of time. A timeless open world game with fantastic adventures and interactions. I'd say my only complaints were a bit of the balancing at the beginning (wolves!), and unusable riches at the end. But otherwise it is just a great RPG adventure. I wish I had the passion about whether the EE is better than the modded original, but I just don't. The EE game is wonderful even if the original (modded or whatever) is better.

Baldur's Gate was and still is an amazing game. Enhanced Edition (EE) doesn't bring that much new things but updated UI and graphics is definitely a plus. Still, you could achieve all that with mods but for lazy guys like myself - Enhanced Edition is better. If I had to choose between original and EE - I would choose EE.

As with BG2, BG1 is a classic and in my opinion the best of the entire series. BG2 is more like a typical DnD session, a bunch of adventures grand and exciting, but lack the cohesion of everything in BG1. Because I love the game so much it was painful to play through the EE by Beamdog. They utterly ruined the experience by injecting their own agendas, characters, and revisions that break immersion and it's very obvious because their writers are so poor next to Black Isle's. In addition they add in sprites from BG2 and other later games that stick out from every other model and it looks terrible. Do yourself a favor and get the real experience by finding an original copy. You won't regret it and it will probably be less buggy than the EE version.

While I agree with some of the comments below, its not quite the same as the old school vanilla bg + mods, its still quite fun. What those old nay sayers forget, is not everyone is technically inclined enough to add in mods, nor have the time to be searching around for all of them. This is a great package with enough playability for a few hundred hours at least.