I am having a reoccurring issue with BG1 where I will be playing through the game and suddenly be unable to talk to NPCs or leave an area.

For the NPCs their dialogue is still triggered when you click on them ("My old tavern's as clean as an Elven arse!") but your character does not approach them.

For being unable to leave an area your character(s) just act like you are telling them to move to that location instead of leaving an area.

This seems to happen at random times and sometimes starting a new game fixes it but the bug always comes back. None of my characters need leveled or anything like that, I've had it happen all the way on Act 3 and I've had it happen after leaving the Inn 5 minutes into a new game. The only common occurrence is that it happens after you load a game .

I have re-installed the game completely and the issue persists. I am running the default game from GoG with no mods or patches on Windows 7 x64. I have ran the game in admin/non-admin mode and it seems to make no difference to the bug.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as the game is currently unplayable. :(

Two things to check :

- level up any characters who are eligible.

- see if one of your characters has been permanently blinded.

I encountered the first bug MANY times while playing with my friend, and the second one at least once or twice.

Only work-around was to re-load a save game, have you tried that? does it help at all?

Nope, none of my characters need leveled. No on is perma blinded unless that can happen while in Candlekeep. :P Yes, I've had mixed results. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes starting a new game works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes exiting out of the game and going back in works, sometimes it doesn't. Anyway I do fix it it comes back in a zone or two or after a few saves. Sometimes it even fixes itself so that I can exit a building but then the next zone I load everything is broken again. :\

I had this problem with my retail version which is why I bought the GOG version, now I'm having the same issue with that which is bloody annoying. It needs a fix.

Time to throw a random idea here then, might not work for all i know, but better then sitting and doing nothing imo.

When this issue happens, have you guys tried to switch to windowed mode (Alt + Enter) to see if it helps any?

Yeah no luck there either :\

I can't image you not having tried this, but I'll post anyway:
When I encountered this problem resting once always solved it, whereas loading a game might not.

Alternatively, and this is a wild stab in the dark, have you tried turning off all character AI? I've seen a lot of erratic behaviour with that enabled over the years.

Well you can't rest everywhere so that doesn't help when I'm stuck in a tavern in town lets say and can't exit it or talk to anyone.

Turning off player AI is a good call, it was on in the latest save I had. My save I loaded was not bugging out this time so I couldn't test it but I'll play around with it a bit tonight and see if the issue happens again with it off.

Nope, turning off the AI did not fix the issue.

I have pretty much the same issue... can't talk to random NPCs, pretty often.

Not all npcs can be spoken to, so unless you are more specific there is no answer to your problem.

The situation in this (vanilla) game was slightly different, after entering Baldur's gate for the first time and talking with Elminster, entered the nearby discount store to chat with Luck Aello. Although his talk cursor was active, when clicking it none of the party characters would move to talk with him.
Moving outside the shop to talk to any NPC such as commoner or nobleman - no problem, returning to talk with Aello, no dice.
Reloading the game made the issue go away at least.