Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

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.

Still charging $20.00 for this is outrageous.

I've played the original Baldur's Gate back to the days when the game and its add on where released and the Enhanced Edition allows to enjoy the gaming experience on current hardware. I've played the Enhanced Edition from 2016 onwards on Windows, Mac OS X as well as Linux without anything to complain about. The original game deserves 5/5 stars and I also give 5/5 stars for the smooth experience on modern computers. From my point of view, the added content is nice but the new NPCs and their related story lines can also easily be omitted if one prefers the original flavor. Maybe a comment for players who play on a Linux machine: The installed game works out-of-the-box. There is no need to tweak anything as long as the listed 32bit libraries are present. This is a circumstance I really appreciate.

It's really great, but it does suffer from the classic D&D early level issues of 1 hit kills you. After first few levels it's not hard. I do have to say that trap finding is complete horse s**t, due how it works, as in, it's really rare for your rogue to spot a trap before you step into it, even if you are careful with 100 in find traps. Also the path finding is often really bad, and can get stuck inside each other, in addition to just everything else. The music is great, the atmospheric forest ambiance is even better. The companion interactions are a bit non-existent. - The Tales of the Sword Coast: This is a bit weird. Apart from the Durlag's Tower which is a fun dungeon, the part that actually gets its own cut scene cinematic etc. with voice over, when you go this one island, is... really odd, as in the whole "adventure" thing is only like 30 minutes in length. - Siege of Dragonspear: Despite what people say, the Siege of Dragonspear is good. It is linear, but the dungeons, companion interactions and music is great. The story is a bit lacking, as in, it does not really make that much sense, but it does tie in BG1 and BG2 together better than not having it. With that all being said, I would recommend picking up a mod pack, like the Gibberlings 3 - Anthology Tweaks. It's an installer that let's you pick and choose what to put in: https://www.gibberlings3.net/mods/tweaks/tweaks/ You'll probably also need this to make it work: https://github.com/ScottBrooks/modmerge