I bought this to prepare for BG 2 (+ToB), and am finally finishing it after SEVENTEEN MONTHS of playing. I have to say I wasn't all that pleased. First, the good: the (A)D&D system is great, the story is also great. This is what I loved in the KotOR games, and it's the very reason I'm still trying out Bioware games. This one is good enough to warrant playing the famous second part, which I've already bought on sale here. Now for the bad: it's not the graphics. It's rather shared with the first Witcher and to a much larger extent all Elder Scrolls games: it often feels like demanding work rather than entertaining, relaxing, or even thoughtful play, which makes it hard for me to want to do it. I'm all for difficult long story-driven open-world games (my favorite RPG is Gothic II : Die Nacht des Raben), but BG simply couldn't hold my attention for more than 20 hours at a time (spread among 5-10 days, of course), and it needs way more than that to finish (upwards of 100, if you count TotSC, side quests, and reloading). Part of the problem here are the battles - they're usually tactical, interesting, hard, however boss fights are so difficult on Normal difficulty (especially for such a non-expert in D&D as I) that each of them required at LEAST ONE hour of my time, trying different tactics and preparations each time, and there were tens of these battles... The need for inventory management also adds to the boredom.
