Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

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.

I bought this a long time ago after hearing so many good things about it, and I've been playing it on an off for about 3 years before actually finishing it. This isn't because the game is bad, but because while I am away for work, I only have a laptop with me, and older games are much easier to run than anything new, so I mainly play such games when I'm away from my main PC. How's this game? As the title says, slow at times, tedious here and there, but that's to be expected from an old game. Exploration is fun, but not as rewarding as I'd like it to be, and the enemies get quite easy to kill after you level up enough. Before that, however, everything's a challenge, which I consider to be a good thing, since I constantly had to use potions or buffs to kill anything that was a few levels above my characters. The story is good, the characters are interesting and the world itself is intriguing. I see some bad comments about this edition of the game, with some people saying that you would be better off playing the original version of the game, but I don't really know about that. For someone who never played this before, I think the EE is good enough. Besides, if the original version has any problem at all with new systems, I doubt anyone's gonna spend time trying to fix anything for a game that at first sight doesn't look that interesting. Overall, this is a great game. Yes, there are gonna be things here and there that won't be that good, such as mechanics and graphics, but that's to be expected for such an old game. However, if you're willing to look past those things and give this game a proper chance, I believe that once you finish it, alongside the DLC, it will stay with you for quite and while.

Have no complaints about the game, just the new "enhanced edition " it's not enhanced! I prefer the original 1x thousand times!! They messed up with the graphics for sure, in exchange they added background noise and few extra capabilities but it's not worth the price! HOW TO ADD THE CLASSIC VERSION AGAIN: - Go to the library > click Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition - Go to Serials > open the link provided > Click "redeem" > DONE! Congrats!! You have the classic "Baldur's Gate Edition"!

last patch bug? can't play in multi, when we sleep => somone bug when we save somone bug and can't use his char plz patch the patch :s

This is the game that got me into Dungeons & Dragons, and in turn tabletop gaming as a whole. I loved this game back in the day, and I still love it just as much, but I do have some issues. The writing is top-notch. Probably the second-best out of all of the Infinity Engine games (the best being Planescape: Torment). Every character, even the annoying ones, are very well written (at least in the original game). A lot of the areas on the map are just empty. It's a slog to go through an unnamed map area in the hopes of finding anything interesting (and sometimes you do, which is why you do it) to have to walk all over the area to remove the fog of war and then move on to the next area to do the same. They fixed this in later Infinity Engine games, which I'm grateful for. Real-time with pause is a BAD mechanic and they never should've went with it. Combat happens in real-time...sort of. Initiative order is still there, so in a way it's still turn-based, but discerning whose turn it is and who's next is I'm pretty sure not even possible, so it makes tactical play irrelevant. Your combat encounters will rely 100% on RNG. This Enhanced Edition even has some really great new improvements on the original, but it also has a handful of new characters and some locations, not all of which are on par with the quality of the original game. But a few badly written parts in the Enhanced Edition doesn't take away from the greatness that is the rest of the game. If you're even a little bit of a D&D fan, or even if you're just wondering what D&D is all about, then play this. Especially with 3 coming out soon.