Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

I recommend everyone play Baldur's Gate, but not this version. The "Enhanced Edition" rerelease of Baldur's Gate has many convenience features that make the game easier to play from a modern standpoint, but at arguably too high a cost. Beamdog has not only removed around half of all the cinematics in the game, but also replaced the other half with (usually) pleasant-looking but shorter and blander substitutes. The humor, character and dynamicity of the originals are gone, unless you restore them with mods. This is a theme that carries over to the rest of the Beamdog's "enhancements" as well—most come with a cost of character, usability, and/or vision. Someone from Beamdog must have a chip on their shoulder about BG1, because they oddly and for no good discernible reason went through the entire game and redesigned many small gameplay systems and content with little to no regard to BioWare's vision or understanding of the original design's purpose. These changes include removing the outer gates of Baldur's Gate and other such arbitrary measures. They also changed the original engine to the BG2 one, and neglected to port over the original character sprites, so the rerelease uses the sprites from the wrong game. In addition, they forgot to restore many smaller engine features from the original game, like ambient character sounds for NPCs and creatures. In many ways, this is version is inferior to the original. In version 2.0, they remade the UI engine from scratch, and in the process they introduced a humongous number of bugs and usability issues to it, and in over four (!) years, they haven't even started working on fixing the problems they've created, despite early on promising to the player community that they would do just that. Since then, they've started a large number of other projects and extracted almost all development resources from the Infinity Engine games, ensuring that the countless bugs and regressions they've added to them will never be fixed.

I'm glad I have the originals on CD and mainly bought the EE versions of BG1 & 2 for convenience. What the hell did they do to the cutscenes though? Gone are the FMV sequences I remember watching vividly.. The voice acting over the top of a bunch of slightly animated stills does not have the same effect on me as the old FMV's. I would rather have purchased the original games on GOG but it doesn't appear that this is possible anymore...

First: ignore reviews from the time this was first released. Developer Beamdog has been patching and tinkering with Baldur's Gate EE for (at this writing) four years, constantly improving the engine, content and quality assurance, and the game now is a significantly more worthy product than it was on launch day. Baldur's Gate EE re-releases and enhances the influential D&D classic, Baldur's Gate, and comes complete with the original expansion, plus several new companions, classses, quests and areas. On top of that, it updates the original to higher resolutions and greater levels of zoom, and adds a wealth of quality-of-life improvements to the interface - most notably around looting and inventory management. It lets you play an icon of the genre without dealing with some of the more frustrating design limitations of the era. There's a school of thought that says that Baldur's Gate EE offers nothing that can't be obtained through heavy modding of the original. If you're someone who must have the control and customisation of mods, there's something to be said for that - although Baldur's Gate EE is now capable of supporting mods itself. But if you want a great game that runs perfectly, straight out of the box, with no fiddling, and delivers the complete Baldur's Gate purchase, this is for you. AND buying Baldur's Gate EE will let you play the excellent Siege of Dragonspear expansion, AND load your game-winning party into Baldur's Gate 2 EE, AND the game is still being improved and patched, with ongoing commitment and support from the developer. What more could you ask for?

Baldur’s Gate happens to be the prequel to my favorite game of all time. As you’ve probably heard many great things about this title already, I’ll try to focus on the more ANNOYING ASPECTS. - Go on an epic adventure that will take you from Level 1 all the way to… Level 8?! The game is designed for LOW LEVEL characters, so even after 70 hours, having done most side quests, my party was around Level 8. Don’t go in expecting to battle dragons, giants or archmages. - Game uses the 2nd edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which can be COUNTER-INTUITIVE. For example, in every other role-playing-game your Armor Class, Saving throws and Chance to hit get higher as you become more powerful, but in Baldur’s Gate their numbers go down. - While the game world is huge, the wilderness areas are mostly EMPTY, with only a couple of interesting encounters sprinkled around in each location. Most of the fun activities take place in the towns of Beregost, Naskel and Baldur’s Gate. - There are around 25 companions you can recruit during your journey, though only a few are actually interesting AND USEFUL. In no particular order, I liked Kagain, Viconia, Edwin, Kivan, Coran, Yeslick, Baeloth and Safana (her sexy voice won me over). They’re nowhere near as fleshed out as the companions from the sequel, having very little dialog with each other, or the people we meet. - The dated graphics and complicated rules make Baldur’s Gate a hard game to get into for new players, even if playing on Story Mode. To that end, I highly recommend getting a mod called “GIBBERLINGS3 TWEAKS ANTHOLOGY”, which helps customize the game rules to your liking. Don’t be scared by the many options, as there’s readme explaining each one in detail. - On the subject of mods, I also recommend “Bg1 NPC project” which adds more banter to your companions. “Portraits portraits everywhere” adds tiny portraits to all the people you talk to. They’re all compatible with the Enhanced Edition.

For years I was not trying this version because I was reading a lot of comments about how bad this version is. I'm a Linux user. Not a beginner, but I consider myself an advanced one. And I don't know how many hours I spent trying to run this "the best and only one original version" + install widescreen mod + bg2 engine. Oh, have I mentioned that I'm from Poland so I really wanted to have a Polish translation? And after all those tries, I said to myself "Srew that, I'm trying EE version". And, oh my god, it just works! JUST WORKS. Full HD, mouse scrolling, Polish language, and it's blazing fast. Like I think that you could even run it on a "smart toaster" currently. I don't know what bugs people are talking about, because after 4th chapter I don't see any. Instead, there are a lot of UX upgrades that you would expect from nowadays games. I'm supper happy with this purchase. So as long as you are not a vanilla lunatic that loves 640x480 resolution, on his good old PC from 2001, just give it a try. You will not regret.