Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

2 stars, only because Baldur's Gate itself is a solid 4 star game and classic version is included (I don't have to wory anymore to scratch my spotless 6cd version in CD/DVD/BR drive I don't have). These "enhanced versions" are nothing more than ports to newer version of Infinity engine. That itself would be nice, adding items highlightnig and many more nice features, but the execution is poor. Sprites borders look terrible, only after disabling both options and enabling nearest neighbour scalling the game looks "right". Images in game have the feeling of being just upscaled from compressed original images. Not to mention additional, unwanted content. I would understand restoring cut content, but adding mods ... What I would really love to see is a true BG:EE remade in Unity engine. That would really bring that classic to the 21st century (waiting for someone to say "challange accepted" :) ).

The game needs no review. These enhanced edtions are all you can hope for a modern experience of these classic rpgs, for old or new players. Sure it's a complex rpg which requires a bit of work but i don' think it still gets better than this. The complexity of the story, the number of the characters and of the side quest makes this a game which need many reruns to be fully experienced. The expansion "Siege of Dragonspear" is fun also and looking incredible.

If you like to mod a mega game (BG I+Addon and BG II+Addon) with lot of Mods then you have to buy the Enhanced Editions + Dragonspear (because it is a nice, ranked between Legend of the Sword Coast (BG I Addon) and Throne of Bhaal (BG II Addon). Funny enough it is middle even in the content. Be aware, the Enhenced Editions (exept Dragonspear of course) where never ment to add extra content but to make the game run on modern hardware. And that it does perfectly as far as i know it. The game engine work much more fluent. That is fine but the real pearl lies within the fluent moddability. Many mods with its newest version are on Enhenced Edition only. Of course it is possible to build a mega-mod with the "not Enhanced Editions" but you have to spend a lot of work in it to function halfway stable especially because most mods are developed and bugfixed in Enhanced Editions only. And even if you can rebuild it and be satisfied with the content (there are soooo many (big) mods avaible, some not avaible for Enhanced Edition (i miss Vecna so much), most for the Enchanced Edition) your game may stutter a lot even if you biffed all the override correctly. And i dont know how often some people here had to reinstall and biffed there mega-mod but trust me, you will spend at least 24 hours for complete installation even if you know exactly what to do. A lot is automatized but if you need to install the mega-mod at first time you need several hours handycrafting the basic. You can batch a lot but this is extra work. I make it easy. If you spend half the day with work then your best choice is to buy the Enhanced Editions. If you have a poor friend with no job or if you want to start modding this game anyway you can stay with the original Edition if you can get an example of course. The engine-build up is different so you have to decide for whom you like to mod if you want to do so for others. If you can beat the stuttering. This is very important for the game experience.

I've never played anything DnD related until this game. It took awhile for me to learn the basics, but I did eventually start to enjoy playing the game especially 2 side quests. There were only 2 issues that were obvious to me. One was minor but consistent enough throughout the game to be annoying: when the characters are on the same path but going the opposite direction, they'd get stuck for ~5 seconds trying to figure out how to get to their destinations. The other issue was a bug towards the end of the game where the spell sequencer didn't work properly. Overall, it was still worth the money when it was on sale. I'm glad to have finished it.

For starts i wanna say I've never played oryginal version and this run was my very first contact with entire game. When you play you absolutely can feel this game is old - it works on dd 2.0 and can be quite... unforgiving. You die often, sometimes its suprising and other times you really deserved it. Active pause and quick load are your best friends. Still, prepare for some frustration along the way. I realy enjoyed background sounds - all these wind whistles, bird's chirping and so on. Voice acting is quite funny, many npc talk with such artificial, pompous manner it's impossible to take them seriously. Still, narrator's voice is amazing and made me always sit and wait until he finished talking, even after I read story quicker. Visuals are a bit blurry, but hey, this game is over 20 years old, what did you expected? In the end I enjoyed the expierience and plan to play second part soon. Giant plus for making it stable, I never had any bug or problem except for one side-quest. You can try it if you like old-school RPG, to understand what was cool 2 decades ago ;)