Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

I've read the bad reviews on GoG, and honestly I do not understand the animosity. I bought this title on sale a few weeks ago, and have played the entire game to very-nearly 100% completion (I may go back and play an evil party at some point). As of version 2.6.6 the new UI works wonderfully, and the game seems mostly bug-free, with the inclusion of thousands of both original and fan-made bugfixes (rendering fixpack mods obsolete). Yes, they have big black outlines to make sprites more visible for people playing on tiny screens, but this is an OPTIONAL graphics feature which seems to be off by default on the PC version. Yes, the Black Pits game is a bit pointless (basically just a tactical game using the BG engine), but it's separate from the main game and you can easily just ignore it. The new companion NPCs are not perfect, but they're in a similar style and generally have more depth than most of the original companions (people complaining about their lack of content are invited to consider that many of the original companions had no content whatsoever after recruitment (Ajantis, Alora, Branwen, Faldorn, Garrick...). While the writing and voice acting aren't going to win any major awards, they're not bad by any means. Lastly there's the Siege of Dragonspear DLC. Is is as good as BG1? That's debatable, but what it has got going for it is plenty of original (non-recycled) characters, items, quests and (especially) maps. I defy anyone to find a free mod with even half as much original content. The story is a little predictable, but honestly given a mandate to write filler between BG1 and 2, they did a good job in my opinion. If Beamdog issued another major Baldur's Gate DLC, I'd snap it up as soon as it was on sale.

BG 1 & 2 are my most favorite games ever. Even little more than Fallout 1 & 2. I know everything by my heart about that game and that is really lot of years when I was playing that so hard. I bought this EE edition in sale. I was making character couple of hours to get max points, which I fortunately saved like first. Game itself I was playing 3 seconds when I needed shut down my PC, because game stopped responding and absolutly messed up my PC to absolutly not react to get even into the task manager, tryed twice. Next two 2-3 second in game playing fortunately shutted down without hard restart. Ok. Tryed everything about "graphic" setting, all combinations. Helped turn off something using graphic card even my is ok. But anyway, after few seconds my character started walking extremely slowly even in game enviroment was fluent and ok (empty inventory). I played normal old version with BETTER graphic day before, playing extremely fluent even from my old flashdisc, 'cuz I can play it even on crap PCs in university. Don't wanna be salty, MAYBE some ideas about game looks good but enviroment of game is messed up just to 'like' we bring new things, so balance is gone. Even cannot play to have ideas about it. Scared of new characters. What was awesome about game was changed to say 'We want 20 euro' which is ridiculous and on edge to be ilegal. UI is dark absolutly ugly piece of "thing". Game graphic improvement are literally caricature of nice graphic before. Just added saturation, contrast.. and borders to make it more annoying for eyes even game before was beautiful like a picture created with flair. First when I got into game I pressed pause and was searching how turn off grey filter and all this.. eh? Why destroy beautiful game to make it claun or black and white? Don't know, even itself is unplayable. I bought also android version. Where they wanna pay for another things in-game again. To pay it on every device and make money. Shame, shame... Beamdog is cancer for me.

One of the best games of all time!

changed the script to add politics the developer didnt intend

As an oldschool Bioware fan, I gotta say off the bat that I have some axes to grind with this “Enhanced” Edition. The very TL;DR is that EE is mostly worth it for the zoom function and convenient, built-in widescreen. Didn't touch SoD, because it feels like fanfic to me. New items and enemies is neat, though. Basically, EE adds more bugs than BG ever had. The UI can freeze if you kick Haer'Dalis. Unresponsive AI. Farsight leaves enemies blinking in an out of sight. Pathing causing characters to get stuck inside each other, to name some. Even the couple of rushed beta-patches of BG 1 and 2 with game-breaking dialogue bugs had less of these surprises than EE. All the while, instead of patching the bugs, Beamdom have “fixed” Bioware design to make the rules more strict and the game less fun. Bard songs don't stack, rendering them an even more underpowered class than ever. Almost all of the kits are taken from IWD 2 and modder fan sites, and I fail to see what exactly Beamdog are charging for. EE adds companions that modders have outwritten and out-voice acted countless times over the decades, for free. EE adds a widescreen support that modders made decades ago, for free. EE also adds “rebalancing” and tweaking that no one asked for. Extra random encounters with faceless trash mobs are added in, adding no flavor for veterans and unfair ambushes for new players. The NPCs are straight out of fanfiction, acting like parodies of previous BG characters. You can easily find better written AND voiced characters on the Gibberlings Three and Spellhold Studios fan sites. For free. And these NPCs aren't fourth wall-breaking and desperate to be clever instead of just having character. Enchantment spells have been nerfed, because a couple of enemies use these spells. The enemies could have been given their own versions of these spells, but Beamdog opts to just render almost an entire spell school even weaker than before.