Back to subject.
EE versions are great for mainstream. Mobile users. First time players. Social justice gamers (talk more than play).
Not so great for those of us who played it back in 2000 who enjoy good old games and how they felt back in the days.

The best version is still in my opinion the original, modded with all those great work done for the last 20 years.
Go to Gibberlings three, pocketplanes net, spellhold studios and weidu org communities for all those modding resources.
Very happy that I bought the original gog BG2 classic, I can still download it. But it is now apparently unavailable to search for on GOG?

Classic edition (if you could call vanilla Baldurs Gate that) got forcibly bundled with the EE versions so it is impossible to buy Baldurs gate 1 & 2 on GoG without sponsoring the manglement.
There's even a official thread about it, complete with sweet little lies from Beamdog:
https://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/regarding_the_removal_of_the_original_ie_games_from_sale_on_gog

And looks like someone's downvoting all of the anti-Beamdog posts again in that link.

Geez, these loser shills really don't have anything to do.

It isn't healthy to care about forum voting systems.
You're saying you're one of the people who "enjoy good old games and how they felt back in the days" yet say the best version is a heavily modded one? That doesn't make any sense.

Most of those mods are nearly as old as Baldur's Gate itself. I know the timeline gets a bit muddied when your introduction to the series was in the late 2010's, but mods were coming out almost immediately after the game's release.

If you think most of the mods people are recommending today were available immediately after the games releases, then I doubt you played the original games at their release dates.

What exactly do you think the Baldur's Gate modding community has been doing for the last 20 years?

Even the mods that were available have probably had significant changes since then, so you can't just install the latest version of a recommended mod if you want the game to feel like it did back in the days.

It's a good thing that neither I nor anyone else said anything remotely like that. I'd say not to put words in my mouth, but why ascribe to malice what might just as likely have been you struggling with the language? Just try harder next time is all I ask.

If you didn't claim you played the original games at their release dates, how can you have known what the modding scene was like back then?

My fault for not explaining myself in excruciating detail when it was clear you're either deliberately or otherwise purely incapable of understanding the point.

Daruman was talking about how twenty years ago when the game released that there was a certain feeling with browsing all the old sharing websites and trying out mods with it. It was a very identifiable and nostalgic musing that anyone from that time would've shared.

You hysterically interjected with your claim that mods didn't exist back then, or at the very least, that there must have been SO FEW that a "heavily modded" version made no sense, implying he must be lying. This is obviously because of his implied anti-Beamdog sentiment, of course, but we'll pretend otherwise for the sake of this post.

I, with the patience of a saint, tried to explain to you, whom it was apparent was not around playing the game back then, that people were modding this game from the get-go. Maybe not all the modern refined ones with twenty years of polish that you know now, but we were sharing shitty mods over AIM and GeoCities right out the gate.

At this point, you (deliberately, probably) missed the point and made the wild claim that people were claiming finished mods from the 2010's had time traveled back to the year 2000 and that we were all somehow claiming to be living in some paradoxical time warp and remembering things that hadn't been invented yet in your crusade to be combative.

I pointed out that no one said anything like that.

You then (deliberately, probably) missed the point again, and acted like I was claiming I hadn't played the game back when it released.

And I, because it's another two hours until my D&D game and I've got nothing better to do, responded this last time and corrected you and your misgivings with the aforementioned excruciating detail in an attempt (that we both know will be fruitless) to put this back and forth to bed.

In that case, then it's either impossible to reproduce how it was back then, or you can reproduce it just the same with enhanced editions.

I still don't see how the comparison makes sense.

There were absolutely mods back in the days around the release of BG 1 and 2. Some were quite good, others were horrible.

There was this one BG2 multiplayer game on Gamespy I played. I was in Waukeen's Promenade when he turned into a lich, cast time stop, and killed me.

No one is saying there weren't.

It's quite doable "reproduce how it was back then", just download the GOG original editions (patched, but bear with me) and apply the (someone's old cdrom's) old mod version. BAM (except for geocities, but there's wayback machine for that). BG1 with mods, without the BG2 engine (another great fault of the EE, no BG1 with BG1 engine!)

" you can reproduce it just the same with enhanced editions.": You most certainly did not play BG1 and BG2 back-to-back to notice just how different they were. BG1 is not BG1EE, not nearly so.

These 2 paragraphs above debunk your argument about "impossible to reproduce". I've in fact gotten pretty fond of playing unmodded BG1, just like back in the day, with even the occasional crash to desktop (the computer freeze is much more rare, though, thanks to win NT)

I bought the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition during the last sale and started playing it this week. I have only played the first three or four hours of the original game when I was little (around 15 years ago, at least), so I shouldn't really be able to notice any differences between the original and this new game besides the obvious change in cutscenes.

Unfortunately, I just stopped playing the Enhanced Edition because of the new characters you meet. One of the early posts to this thread mentioned that a new player wouldn't be able to tell the difference between new and old characters, but I think that's untrue.

The new characters are fully voice acted, so you'll immediately be able to tell who is new and who isn't. They adhere to the modern standard of video game writing, which is to only make 'super-characters' playable. What I mean by that is that the two new characters I've met during the first few hours were both very clearly a big deal. One was a super duper talented magic user while the other was a really special monk from a very special order. This is in stark contrast to the original characters (at least the ones I've met) that were just dudes and dudettes. Yeah, they may be odd, but they seem normal. They are not special people from special places with special skills, they are just people. The only special person is you, and you don't even know why you're special.

So, I do recommend you stick to the originals as they are far more... Relaxed? Comfy? At least based on my experience with this game. Again, this modern video game writing style always tries to set up for big plots and twists, but that's not what good stories should be about in my opinion.

And besides that, I think it's just not a good idea to update old games with new content. It's like rewriting history, even if it is just video games. I am glad GOG included the original, which I am installing right now.