Da hatten die Programmierer die Möglichkeit, ein bereits gutes Spiel aufzupolieren, aber alles, was ihnen dazu einfiel, waren eine extrem nervige Zoomfunktion und eine völlig sinnfreie Umorganisation der Ordner und Unterordner. Schade - mit etwas gutem Willen hätte man so viel mehr als diese Verschlimmbesserung eines einst guten Spiels in Umlauf bringen können. Wer Baldur's Gate liebt, sollte beim Original bleiben, da weiß man, was man hat...
My respect for the good will to create a decent clone of Baldur's Gate. Those who love a sheer endless world of the (in huge parts community-created) Baldur's Gate Trilogy will be disappointed by the missing depth and the tiny size of the PoE world as well as the missing opportunities to write great mods like "Shadows Over Soubar" or "The Dakest Day". We should not forget: It was the possibility to create (charge-)free community expansions which made Baldur's Gate a great game - not the plain vanilla versions, not additional commercial stuff. Nowadays, even simple tools like the IEmod were taken from the community and commercialised - fast money beats community interests. Not to speak about the idiotic proprietary file formats you can't get any information about, not to speak about the dull emphasis on strategy and micro-management, not to speak about annoying restrictions and counter-productive hard-coded rules (like being bound to an attacker coming too close while you attack with ranged weapons), et cetera. All in all: Maybe a great game for those who never played Ultima, Wizardry or BG, but at best an average game with conceptual flaws for senior RPG players like me (who still run a fully blown BGT installation...).
...if we look at the facts. The only thing Beamdog really did was to change the internal structure of the game and destroy the strict (in a positive sense) file hierarchy. They distributed savegames and other vital data all over the media (in my case two different SSDs), making it almost impossible for modders and tool-makers to find out where the important files are hidden now (the original games kept everything in their game folder). Too bad about the money I sent to Beamdog - it was a total loss compared to my four original boxes with paper manuals, cloth maps, et cetera. There had been so much they could have done, but they decided to take our freedom to customise the game, forcing all users to obey new 'rules' no one ever heard of, e.g. cancelling the effect of boots of speed as long as you wear a ring of free action and tons of other - partially even worse - downgrades no one really needs. All in all - if you own the original game, there is no reason to feed Beamdog with money. If you do not have the original, go to ebay and look for the original boxes - they are ways better and consistent without restrictions for those who pay for an unnerved game!
