I believe that you completely misread my post.

There are writers whose style I enjoy, but whose views I don't share (and by the way, you assumed what my views are). I read them regularly.

There are writers whose views I share, but who are poor writers. I avoid their works.

There are writers whose views I don't share, and who are poor stylists. I also avoid their works, because their style is poor on a technical level.

There are writers whose writing technique is good, but whose work just doesn't speak to me. I acknowledge their skill, but I don't read them (off the top of my head, I'm not fond of either Joseph Conrad or Flannery O'Connor).

If an author is getting slammed for their social views alone, that's one thing, but to excuse bad writing because their beliefs are the only thing that's important tells me that they don't really care about their craftsmanship.

If your doctor is incompetent, should you let him/her treat your illness, just because he/she "wants to help people"?

Why shouldn't I demand competent writing in my RPGs?

I don't get why people are upset by this. Even if we disregard their desire to make money, and I guarantee that's important to them, would you rather that they make the expansion work with the rather limited BG1 version of the Infinity Engine?

I think including support for the original BG1 would have either been too limiting to the expansion (engine-wise), or too much of a pain in the ass for them to code for two different engines. Factor in their desire to make money, and the decision to only support the EE version is a no-brainer.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the engine for BG2, sure I probably wouldn't use BG1 engine. My setup with both games and BWS works fine with over 36gb of content. Why would I want to pay any extra £10 to play - at least what was - a buggy re-release, with not a lot of additions - other than bugs - and a widescreen patch. its all well and good supporting them wanting to make new content, but I have yet to see any benefit to these "enhanced" versions.

Anyways, the discussion is getting rather dry on these topics now. For me, BG1+2+BWS is the definitive version of the game, costs virtually nothing, so for me that is a no-brainer.

A single core engine that doesn't support using more than 3GB RAM has nothing wrong. Or has those things been fixed?
Yes, IE was lovely at its time, but not anymore. At least a new engine should be able to fix those issues.

Sorry, I hadn't realised that BG was now chucking out >60fps with DX12? It is a game with pre-rendered 2d backdrops, and 3d characters. It doesn't need anything further.

You're right. Who cares if the game uses 100% of your CPU, that won't affect CPU life expectancy or prevent you from doing other stuff at the same time. And it's a pre-rendered 2d backdrop with 3d characters, it obviously needs the full power of your CPU to display them.
IE does have limitations. If you are fine with your CPU running at a much higher load than it should, by all means use that. But that doesn't make IE an engine with nothing wrong.

As for the RAM limitation, it means that there is a limit to how much stuff can be in an area. Not sure what the limit is, or if the games do push it, but the engine itself is limited.

P.S. Problem reported as back as 2001, if not earlier.

Wow! ToB was released in 2001 - you'd think they could've fixed this!

Not to mention that none of these people whining about how the line is 'out of character' or 'breaks immersion' or whatever complained about Quayle's lines including a direct allusion to The Wizard of Oz, Khalid's to Porky Pig, Dynaheir's to Nancy Sinatra, Garrick's to Shakespeare and Monty Python and Mr Rogers...

In any case, anything that ridicules Gamergate is a good thing (though Gamergaters generally manage to make themselves look ridiculous without any assistance from the rest of us).

Double the cost for soundtracks, it better be the publishers doing, but it doesn't matter, keep the poxy soundtrack.
Nice as an added bonus, never paying for crap that should be free.

Having said that, i wasn't buying it until the fuss flared up, bigots changed my mind.
While I can get behind criticism based on badly made games, I'm all for playing with more diversity.

While I agree with Gamer Gates supposed motive, fighting corruption, I think it starts at the top, with AAA publishers, attacking indies justifiable or not, is small fry, I blame the top predators, not the bottom feeding ones.

You might call me SJW, I think that' fight is a waste of time. Go after the Industries top end, that's where the corruption starts, and they make sure that there type of corruption, is already legal, but moral corruption it remains.
if that confuses you, who pays for the Adverts, controls the message.

Dice giving Fallout 4 Game of the Year, yeah right, I'm a Bethesda Games Studios fan and love modding their games.
I wouldn't give it game of the week, Tomb Raider got that, and I hate console exclusives, moved to PC due to them.
Witcher 3 was my Game of all time, not one year.
The runner up was the XCOM: Long War, my mod of all time.

2015 was a standout year, Fallout 4 was a poor on rails FPS, hardly the best of anything.
Even their standard, mod support has been put to shame by XCOM 2, with day 1 full mod tools.
Still waiting for the GECK,,

Anyway now going to give it a go, thanks to fuss, plus bonus now got enhanced on GOG as well as originals.
Two more Stem games destroyed (Can't give away).

Wait, what, I thought you would have to own a game on GOG to review it.

You're telling me now, i an owner couldn't put up a review, (Superhot one never appeared, topic on here about it).
I accept that was a bug, but anyone can write a review, without having the game.

Last time I read GOG reviews, in that case.

Brought, and looking forward to playing it.
Not the DD edition due to the high cost of the package, had it contained more than just music i may have given it a closer look.

40 tracks, 33 of which are from the original game, 34-40 are Enhanced Edition tracks by composer Sam Hulick, dealing with the Enhanced Edition NPC's quests and The Black Pits.

Thanks! :) And what about the soundtrack for SoD? That title track they've been playing non-stop on the Beamdog streams really got to me, and I so want it. :D

I've been reading transcripts and watching YouTube videos.

I swear, BeamDog writers sound like Nintendo rejects.

Maybe it's just written for the meme generation, borderline illiterate with the attention span of a goldfish on crack, and amused by anything that they can view as an inside joke.

I wouldn't mind playing it for myself to see if it's really that bad or if it's being blown way out of proportion, but I already feel kinda ripped off for what I paid for the EEs, so no more money for those guys.

Especially not after the manufactured controversy and the sock puppet trolls they've been spreading around.

I played a steam edition version until I got to the coalition camp.

I will separate my impressions about the game in 3 groups:

The Good:

New content for the Baldur gate Saga.

The Neutral:

Corwin daughter reply when you try to assure her that her mother is safe with you was a bit unexpected coming from a small child (I would have expected that reply coming from Corwin itself).

The cleric of Tempus comments regarding her name were a bit unusual for a medieval RPG.

The new UI.

The Bad:

A) Bugs:

1-The new default graphic renderer has higher system requirements, could not play on my Windows XP PC that handled the Baldur Gate EE before the patch (the GOG version of BG EE with the new patch has the same issue).

The Windows XP PC has a P4 Northwood 2,4GHz - 533 bus, Intel 865G (Extreme Graphics 2) 60GB HDD and 1GB RAM.

A potential solution would be to change the video renderer by activating the Alternate Renderer option from Graphics (i will need to test it on that PC when I have the time)

I also have a Windows PC with Intel E5300 2.6GZ, (Intel G43 Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500HD) 4GB RAM, and a Intel 520 SSD.

Unlike the Windows XP PC that crushed during the creation of the character, this worked but the party moved very slow especially when there are a lot of people around them (the issue is worse if you zoom in).

The solution was to use the Alternate Renderer from the Graphics menu, after this the only issue was a bit of sound delay when playing the movies.

2- Changing difficulty by itself - Sometimes the game changes the difficulty levels by itself and you cannot change that back from Gameplay menu, you need to use another save.

3-Missing goblin shaman NPC from its location on the map.

4-The members of your party lose the hard fought equipped items after they leave your company (when the starting dungeon level is finished) When recruiting them they have some generic items (magical but lower quality than Varscona+2, Cloak +2 , The shield you gain from Durlag Tower, The Dual Handed +3 sword from Durlag Tower. Ogre Hands gauntlets, Flame tongue)

A potential solution is to keep the best items in your character inventory and equip them when get them back in your party.

5- Low level cap, for fighters and paladins I can get them to the same maximum level / to a higher level by importing them in Black Pits (my usual tactic before importing them in Baldurs Gate 2.

B) No more free roaming on the map like in the initial BG EE.

Not necessary a bad thing in general (it's a matter of taste) I did not like the Stupefier nerfing as it was a key weapon in defeating the DemonKnight and it allowed me to give Minsc a decent weapon early on, a weapon that allowed him to carry a shield.

A general opinion about this expansion: I will buy it in the future when most of the bugs are solved. I would not have minded another 6 months of waiting for the beta testers to report the issues and the developers to take care of them.

LE for spellcheck.