Hi all,

First off, I want to get out of the way Beamdog's practices and how they removed the original games and how they added sub par content in the games and everything else that I've been missing.

The thing is, I've been playing the originals for years now and I want to try these Enhanced Editions since I already have them in my account. What I want to know, as of the current versions, how buggy are Baldurs Gate 1 and 2?

I know that the modded originals are preferred, and I am trying to learn how to reverse engineer so I can fix one silly little journal bug in the originals, but how are the Enhanced Editions by themselves? How are they with a limited amount of mods (like the UI mod by lefreut)? If I were to do a full playthrough (of BG 1 and 2 not SoD) would I run into any bugs. Is it a smooth experience? I know originally there were a lot of issues, but have they been ironed out?

Thanks in advance everyone!

I finished BG1:EE on win7 from Steam even tho I own them all on both GOG and Steam. My experience with it was very very buggy which I believe is still the latest version. I am pretty sure that I reported those bugs but they no longer exist on my beamdog bug report account. What's worst, I wiped out my C drive to install linux with win7 after finishing the game so all my save games are gone. I almost cried when I noticed that.

After that needless introduction, I'll try to summarize the bugs I encountered.

Items disappearing from inventory. They just vanish. I open a previous save and the item is there.

Bags of holding being buggy. I remember specific situations with gem and scroll bags. In one case pearls were disappearing from the bag and in an other time some rings would become infinite. I would unload all of them, sell them and open the bag again to see them all there again. Not a bad thing of course :)

Quests not updating on journal AND some quests actually being broken, like cursed commander's quest being unable to finish. I had to load a previous game, did exactly the same thing and this time it worked. I realized something was broken since I finished the original BG1 5 times. This is actually 2 different problems. Journals sometimes simply say something like "no data" so you dont know at what point of the quest you are. At one point my journal was full of that error.

Map note going crazy. Whenever I put a note on the map, when leave and then return to that map, the entire map would become full with messed up notes. That became incredibly annoying at the sewers.

Final battle became unfinishable. All characters were friendly and i was unable to force attack them. There was no dialogue. I dont remember how i fixed this.

I would really prefer showing you screenshots of those situations.

I installed BG2:EE on linux but I never really played it. I am not a big fan of bg2.

IWD:EE on the other hand works splendid. Everything works as it should. Fans say that IWD:EE kept stable because they did not upgrade the game to 2.xxx versions which added some functionality to the BG games yet broke the game in the process. I only played the latest version of BG1:EE so i cant make a comment about that.

I bought BG1 EE during the summer sale on GOG and has been playing through it for the first time (the EE I mean, I played the original game many times before) and I haven't encountered any bugs yet. I have already completed most of the original content (including the 3 Ulgoth's Beard quests) and I am nearing the end of the game. I am also playing on Win7.

I cannot comment on how buggy the added quests and characters are, since I tried to avoid them as much as I could (what I've seen of them did not cause any bugs though) - two of the characters are too OP anyway and the other two didn't seem to offer anything that the other original NPCs cannot already do. (And imo a low level monk is more of a liability anyway.)
So from a technical standpoint I have had no trouble whatsoever with this version of the game, and it is a nice alternative if one doesn't want to go through the hassle of having to install both BG1 and BG2 and then the mod that converts BG1 into the BG2 engine.

I'd say if you want to try it out then for a reduced price it is worth it - 20$ might be a bit too much for a technical update of a game that you can also do yourself via other means for free, but for the average sale price (5-6$) it is perfectly fine I think. If you don't like the additional content you can just avoid most of it and then whamm, it's just like as if you were playing the original modded version, (yes, the GUI is different, but imo there's nothing wrong with it) but without all the hassle. Plus the EE is now compatible with most of the smaller fan mods too.

Mostly the same bugs I had. The game is a proper mess.

As you said: the IWD EE works perfectly. It is a superb product all in all. Like you mention it hasn't gotten that dreaded 2.0 patch yet. The 2.0 patch for BG ruined the games.

^^ This. The games were never bug-free... still aren't, but they were playable until this abomination of a 'patch'. Beamdog screwed up royally with the 2.0 patch. That said, I haven't played with the latest patches installed, so it's possible many of the introduced bugs may have been addressed, but I doubt very much if the graphics has improved any. What an eyesore.

I have completed the first BG:EE right now, and I founded less buggier than BGT. One single crash is what i have encountered.

This is what the sprites look like now

http://imgh.us/bg_patch_difference.jpg The one on the left is with the new outline turned off. On the right you see what Beamdog claims are "the classic sprites". Which is BS. The classic sprites looked way better than that. The left ones look way too...I dunno. they look like characters from Ultima 8. They don't mesh well with the backgrounds. Kind of like cartoon atop live action movies or something.

http://imgh.us/sprites_2.jpg This is the default sprites introduced with the 2.0 patch. I haven't met any that are a fan of those.

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Icewind-Dale-Enhanced-Edition-PC-467531-15.jpg Here is what they look like in the IWD EE. The sprites look great. The BG sprites used to look like this before the 2.0 patch as well. They completely screwed the sprites up. When they patch IWD up to 2.0, the sprites in that game will get completely messed up too.

Anyway. You are right. The graphics have NOT improved. They get worse by each patch.

Yes, it bloody well *is* BS. Attached is what classic sprites look like. In fact they look better, because I enlarged the image by 200% to match the image size you posted as far as possible. Enlarging decreases image quality. I've played BGT dozens of times and never had a single crash... ever. I've play EE less times than I have fingers on one hand and had more crashes than fingers I have on both hands.

Pretty stable, IMO. (There are some problems on Linux, but that is a more or less across the board issue with native Linux games on GOG and is not so much the fault of any particular developer as it is an issue with C++ libraries, specifically the lack of a consistent ABI across versions.)

I did get the occasional crash, but I'm not sure this can really be pinned on Beamdog either - I can't say the originals were bug free either. As for the graphics? Okay, the graphics may or may not be better at any given moment in time, but let's put it this way - when I cut my gaming teeth, after all, 320x200 was the standard resolution, and it was a bonus if you as much as had 256 colors ... so a lot of the time I'm willing to give graphical faux pas a pass :)

What an extraordinary statement, considering you're talking about a so-called "enhanced" edition.

I have had several crashes with the classic editions, so far only one with BG2:EE - and that was because my graphics driver crashed (tip: Don't buy an Alienware!). The latest GoG version works like a charm on Windows 10, with no need to install mods.

I finished the game in some of old patches becouse i got boxed version distritubuted to shop, before there was an option to get steam version and beamdog out of it.

Still i did not encounter any big time bugs, and i was running around with keeper little and still everything worked fine, even character export to BG 2 before EE for it was released. I dont know how people encounter so many bugs, i played the game 2 times at that time. Now im playing again and everything is in order.
Now i am checking BGT:EE and well so how it goes.

BG:EE was fine when I played it, maybe a handful crashes during the game.

It was pretty buggy for me. About 6-9 months ago, I think. Mostly interface bugs/issues, rather than actual story/quests bugs. And crashes about every 2 hours.