Baldur's Gate: EE - Review
 

Mortismal Gaming checked out the Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate 1:

More information.

Still a very enjoyable game after 22 years!

The only feature that I didn't enjoy too much is the 2.0 ruleset, mainly because I had never played it before. Mostly just a getting-used-to issue though.

Bah 22 years that just means I'm old. I remember playing the original version when I was a young teenager. It was a X-Mas gift along with Fallout 2. Good time that was.

I remember it was sold out at one store and I got the last copy at a computer store in a mall. Was also right before Christmas. I was 29 though, so get off my lawn you young punk :biggrin:

He made the first Player Guide video as announced in the video above :)

Link to the original manual.

i feel you! good times indeed !!

I was late to the party on this one at original release, due to an absurd fascination with Everquest at the time. I think it was almost two years after release before I first got around to playing it, loved it to pieces and went back to my mmo. -p

Fallout 2 I did play on day of release, it must have happened just before I got involved with Everquest. It was my last solo game for quite a while.

My gawd… a teenager. I wish. I was nearing my first divorce when I played it when it came out. (Thankfully, my second marriage worked out better… though now I'm afraid of playing any Baldur's Gate game again!) =)

lol SSIGuy.

Low chance theres a cause and effect there :)

I went back through to replay this so I'd have a character for the Siege of Dragonspear expansion. After all this time, I find that the pathfinding logic is still ridiculously addled. Come on developers, this is supposed to be the enhanced edition!

I think I still have my Gold Box diskettes in a moving box somewhere. SSI was the bee's nips back in the day! Get off my lawn.

When was your replay? They released a major update a few months ago that supposedly included improvements to the pathfinding.

Personally, I never had a big issue with it even in the original.

Just finished a full playthrough. I added a ton of mods, plus SoD which I hadn't played. It was really enjoyable (It's been at least 5 years since I did a play through). The combination of the Ascension mod plus the NPC quests for Neera, Rasaad and Hexxant really made ToB much more enjoyable (I hated how linear it was in the past).

I am still amazed at how in all my play throughs, I don't think I've ever had the same prologue twice! Such an amazing game.

I'll probably avoid the Beamdog NPCs when I do my EE run prior to BG3, but I'm thinking of using the Ascension mod. Despite not wanting the harder boss battles, I like what I've heard about the options it adds to the final chapter.

I'm a heathen who purchased and played bg2 before I played bg1. I've probably replayed bg1 many times more than bg2 which has also been played to death. Good times and I still have my boxes and manuals etc.

Same here - played BG2 first … and honestly I don't think there is anything about BG1 that isn't improved in BG2 and I don't have the same romantic feelings about BG1 - but to be clear it is still an incredible and groundbreaking game that I love.

I like this guy's YouTube channel - found him on a couple of Solasta videos and he does a good job with things.

Sometimes I prefer to play a low level campaign. Bg2 is fun but it can get to epic levels quite quickly and I prefer the challenge of lower levels and less options sometimes. Plus Bg1 is a little less linear than bg2 in some respects so that aids my immersion some and keeps it fresh.

Unless my memory is off (which is a possibility) I remember someone posting semi-frequent hype about the upcoming BG1 months before it was released, and many of us had our eyebrows raised as if it was just another hyped-up game at a time when RPGs seemed to be going downhill. But BG1 delivered bigtime, and I remember enjoying it a whole lot early on.

I still remember and quote "Never had rats" from the first inn (in I think Candlekeep?) and "Wife's been getting prickly on me arse." Good times.

I've replayed BG1 a couple of times over the decades, including maybe 10 years ago, and it mostly holds up over the years, though BG2 I always felt is one of the greatest of all games.

BG1: Nature.
BG2: City.

That's basically it. Oh, and low vs high level, obviously.

Yeah, I remember we talked about this before. I think BG2 definitely built on BG1 in many ways, but I did miss that lower level exploration, just wandering about in woods and ruins. I usually find that that I enjoy RPGs more the less they tend towards earth-shattering events.

Neera was the only NPC that was in my party for most of the game. I figured out that if you've logged enough hours on each part, you can pick up Rasaad and Hexxent (probably Neera too) and immediately go into their quests, then ditch them when they're done (until the next portion of the game). That way I was able to play all the new areas. I did this with a lot of the original NPC's too. Basically had one spot that I rotated through NPC's. For the Beamdog NPC's, I found the new areas in BG1 to be pretty meh, but I thought they did a much better job with the quests and areas in SoA and ToB.

I love the open world part of BG1. That's really what sold me on the game years ago when it came out. I just kind of wandered around exploring. Felt a lot like the old Ultimas to me. I also prefer the brighter color pallet and well less gritty version of the world. Again, reminds me of Ultima. Ohh and I'm terrible at tactics, so the higher level battles of BG2 don't hold as much for me. I fully recognize that the story is significantly deeper, better written and just better overall, but I prefer the overall feel of the first game. Would love a total conversion or something that replicated that.

Just a few weeks back. Yes I saw the bug release note about the supposedly improved pathfinding, but I didn't see any difference. The issue always shows up in Durlag's Tower when characters take the long way around -- right through the traps -- when the path is temporarily blocked. I'm always having to pause and click again to reset the path.

I plan on finishing with the canon party, but maybe I'll do what you did and pick up the new NPCs just long enough to check out their quests. I never liked the idea of Beamdog adding new NPCs tbh, and the feedback about them seems mixed at best.

I agree. BG2 is better in some ways, but I missed the freedom of BG1, and I feel the pacing is better in the first game. You get too many quests heaped upon you at once in BG2.

I'm surprised you installed the Ascension mod. Doesn't that make the high-level battles even harder?

like most stuff, that feedback was when they first came out I think. And they were pretty meh in BG1. Different for the sake of being different, and the new areas where very shallow. The banter is a lot better in BG2 as well as the quests (at least for the three NPC's I did).

In some ways, not one of my brighter moves! That said, I wanted the experience of a less linear ToB and some of the changes in dialogue. And since I added a ton of mods, my characters were pretty much ridiculously over powered by the end anyway, just the way I like it!