Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

I am a guy that lives RPGs, but buys far more than he plays! I bought the original baldurs gate on CD (remember those?) when it first came out but rarely played it. So a couple of days ago I decided to blast through this on Story Mode so I could get the story and not take overly long to complete it. I wasn’t interested in combat being challenging or dragging my play through out as I knew my attention span wouldn’t tolerate a long play. Overall I think it was quite well done in terms of the story but not wonderful. It seemed to spring the plot “twist” on you very suddenly which I found to be odd. I base my rating purely on the story quality and for the age of the game the story was not only engaging but also delivered well through game play and cutscenes etc. Definitely worth a look and story mode to me made the dates graphics and mechanics a non issue.

Play it. And the second one. And the Planescape Torment. That's it. That's the whole advice and review. One of best RPGs ever. And Beamdog fixed lot of their bugs. What else to say?

I had the game on my to-play list since a long time, since it is a classic and I am a big fan of CRPGs. Now in anticipation of Baldurs Gate 3 I finally pulled the trigger and took the time to play through it. It was a great experience and it aged well enough to be enjoyable to play through. To my surprise it did not play quite as the CRPGs I already knew, having such little focus on story and dialogue, and especially because of the lifeless companions. But the combat, even though a bit clunky at times, was challenging and interesting. The setting of the game and the little story/dialogue bits were captivating and interesting and I am looking forward to continue with Baldurs Gate 2 soon, for which I have high expectations. On the technical side I had no issues and the game ran perfectly fine for me. To summarize I think the game is very good and can recommend anyone to play it and the great expansion Siege of Dragonspear.

Before you get all up in arms, the writing and characters are good. The thing that really irritates me is the combat. I'll have my party of 6 people beating the holy fucking shit out of one guy, and none of us can seem to hit. Eventually, after like 30 seconds of this, the enemy will likely die with maybe one or two of my people getting hit. The combat is so incredibly boring that I just cannot get into this game. That's not my only problem, either. Some random enemies that shouldn't be hard to kill are nearly impossible. I'm not sure if they're exclusive to the enhanced edition or not, but its fucking ridiculous. I get to the town of Beregost, which is about an hour into the game. I go into the Inn that Imowen was talking about, and what happens? This guy harrasses me for being an adventurer, and no matter what I say, he ends up fighting me. I could just leave the inn, but why should I have to do that? So I fight this guy and his friend. His friend gets killed almost instantly, but this guy who started the fight is invincible. He single handedly will kill my entire party every time I load up my save game. He's one random HUMAN NON-ADVENTURING MAN that will kill my entire party. Compare that to these two Orcs I found, all kitted up with weapons and armor. I wiped the floor with them. No one in my party got hit once, and we decimated them within seconds. What kind of balance is that? A battle hardened, been fighting since he was born Orc goes down within seconds, but this random farmer who isn't an adventurer is able to, with his bare fists, kill my whole entire party. I'm still planning on at least trying Baldur's Gate 2, so I hope that that one is much better and I can actually finish it.

I bought this piece of excrement to play the Black Pits together with a friend. We've spent 6 hours "playing", 2 of which we've played, most of which we've fiddled with various things. After the 5th (or so) fight in the Pits we actually had to program our way out of a bug which has clearly been prevalent for about a year, according to the online (non-Beamdog sources) we managed to find. An excellent game, but a shite version. Would not buy again.