I finally got around to buying the game for this year's annual playthrough of the original BG trilogy. I found myself enjoying the first half, but towards the end it dragged on. Some of the content was interesting enough, but overall the game is let down by poor writing and is padded out with bad side-quest design. On sale I feel like I just got my money's worth and I'm glad I bought it to satisfy my curiosity but I can't see myself playing through it again. Good: - Beautiful hand crafted scenes. The new Beamdog aesthetic looks out of place in the original games but stands on its own really well here. - Voice acting was mostly very well done. - Revisiting some parts of Baldur's gate was fun. OK: - The story is OK. It is very linear which is fine, but there's not a lot of depth to it, and some of the more intriguing aspects are not explored enough or explained at all. - Companions and their dialogues were enjoyable if a bit bland. Bad: - The writing was poor. Lots of exposition, and it really forces the narrative towards filling in the gaps between BG1 and 2 when it would have been more elegant to leave some things unsaid or hinted at. - There's not much room for nuance in your role play, choices are often limited to Good/Apathetic/Comically Evil and sometimes these choices result in the same dialogue being returned. - Too many side-quests are tiny fetch quests, either flesh them out into a narrative or remove them completely. Often these quests result in giving you rewards that are way out of proportion to the measly task you just undertook. - Itemisation is weird. After the low-magic gameplay of BG1, getting more magic items thrown at you than the start of BG2 feels strange. Many of the items don't feel like they fit lore-wise either.
