Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

Weirdly, I only recommend this game if you've played it before, preferably when it was released. If I played it now, without being there at the end of the 90s, and being completely blown away by it, I'd probably play this for an hour or so before going on to do something more fun. However!!! ........ However, I was probably about 26 when I played it, so half a lifetime ago for me, and it is nice to explore the open world maps again, and enjoy what these guys built. It's a comforting, retro experience. I still love the artwork and the music. But there are plenty of frustrating aspects to this game that I wouldn't forgive if the game was new.... so (again), only recommended - by me - if you're revisiting it :)

After finishing Baldur's Gate 3, I moved on to the next game on my list which was an action game. I thought I was ready to move on from the CRPG style of gameplay, but it turns out I was wrong. After getting curious and looking up the original games and then seeing that they would play on my Steam Deck, I immediately took advantage of a sale to pick them up. Well, you know where this is going. Bye bye planned action game. Hello, 1998 CRPG. There was no nostalgia effect for me. This was purely an appreciation for the world of D&D combined with a great experience with the game design. Also, it's a testament to how great playing on my Steam Deck OLED is. This was a relaxing play through that I kept wanting to play well past bedtime.
Are the graphics great? Nah. Was the story original? Nah. Did I just enjoy it the whole way through and am now moving on to BG2? You bet.

Are you pushing 50 and feeling nostalgia for those days when you used to play D&D with all your friends? Do you like weird side quests and byzantine rules? Do you really really, really really, like killing Kobolds? Then girl, I have just the game for you!

It is a canonical work of rarely seen proportions.
Baldur’s Gate is the role-playing game that set the standard for fantasy RPGs for decades, and if one were to compare its status and importance to works within cinema, it could fairly be called the Citizen Kane of role-playing games. That is how significant and influential BioWare’s 1998 classic truly is.
From a gameplay perspective, it feels close to perfection, even if younger players may initially find parts of it dated. However, if they give the game a genuine chance, I am convinced they will discover its greatness — especially thanks to the excellent “Enhanced Edition” releases by Overhaul Games. The controls remain intuitive, and with the enormous flexibility surrounding difficulty options, the game is perfectly suited for both hardcore veterans and complete newcomers.
The game’s mise-en-scène is genuinely genre-defining, filled with varied and memorable environments. Personal highlights include the forests surrounding the Wood of Sharp Teeth. The colours of the trees still strike me during every playthrough as absolutely stunning. The world feels cohesive and alive, and the way characters react to your actions creates an impressive sense of immersion — especially for those who experienced the game in the late 1990s.
The dialogue is also of the highest quality, with a sense of humour that was never fully recaptured in Siege of Dragonspear, even if I still appreciate that expansion greatly, and perhaps above all for its ambition. The tone balances the deep darkness at the heart of the narrative with the adventurous spirit that defines most of the player’s journey. The pacing suits me perfectly as well, with a mystery that slowly grows larger and more ominous the longer you play, before culminating in a grand finale.
I have completed this game at least fifty times, and I will continue returning to this legendary adventure — especially in its refined Enhanced Edition form. In truth, I can barely mention a single negative aspect, simply because I am far too much of a fan, even if I fully understand why certain elements may frustrate some players. I loved the game when it released shortly before the turn of the millennium, and somehow, I love it even more today.
If you have the time, and are willing to invest yourself in a truly extraordinary role-playing game, then this is the ultimate place to begin.

ok so, ill get right to the point on this one:
if you are coming here looking for a nostalgic old dungeons and dragons game with an engaging story and fun characters, you have come to the right place!
HOWEVER, if you are coming here just after playing baldurs gate 3 then chances are that i would NOT recommend this game. this game is to old and clunky by today's standards and doesn't even make sense sometimes (ie: saving throws).
considering all this i guess its a little bit silly that i played and 100% this game because i actually DON'T like old d&d.

Coming to this game in 2025 as a BG3 (and general DnD 5e) player, it uses an ancient and super obtuse version of DnD that can only have been designed by a sadist or a madman. The combat mixes real-time and turn-based and gets the worst of both worlds. Even after finishing the game I still have no idea when turns begin or end. There are far too many enemies, they are all dumb as bricks, and they respawn way too fast.

That said, the foundation of this game is really interesting. It's got a huge open world before that was a common thing, there are tonnes of recruitable characters and loads of classes to play as, meaning that you can really make each run unique, and I just really love the Forgotten Realms as a setting.

I would definitely recommend giving it a shot, but watch some YouTube videos first to teach yourself the basics. I would love if they did a modern remake using more current design sensibilities but as the chances of that are basically 0, this version is probably as good a version of BG1 as you'll get.

Absolute classic. In which way?
Let's take Dracula by Bram Stoker for example. Absolute horror classic that layed the basis of every single vampire story that came after. Does it mean it was one of a kind? Not really... Other vampire books were written before (Carmilla), but it was this one that stuck to people. When you're reading Dracula, you can sense just how much it has influenced pop culture and literature for the next century and a half.
Similarly, playing Baldurs Gate makes you recognise mechanics that games 30 years after are still using.
For example, the morale system. It wasn't the first one to use it, mind you, but the impact it has on some interactions is definetly groundbreaking, and so is the pacing of the story.
You never feel like you're dragging or digressing when you're completing a side-quest, for two reasons. First, the quality of the side material is just as good as the main story, so you're not feeling the abrupt downgrade in writing quality that characterizes "filler episodes" in TV or literature. Secondly, sometimes they're written into the story so well that you don't realize you're sidequesting. You're gonna run into a town in your travels that tell you of a super powered magic tower, and your journal (absoltue banger mechanic that let's you organically keep track of everything that's happened) tells you it'll be important. In that same town you have a passage to a dungeon, and a mission about freeing the naive halfling residents of the town from a underground secret cult that kidnaps their people in the night (you can even help the organization and kidnap the kids yourself!!). All of this happens in a throwaway town in the middle of nowhere that you just... run into. And you're compelled to explore it because the main story organically incorporates the town in the journey, and doesn't pressure the player into completing it, instead it just points into a direction, letting you craft your own adventure as you see fit.
Sound familiar? Fallout New Vegas, the critically overlooked-fan favourite-cult object- incomplete masterpiece of a game, uses an identical format in their narrative, twelve years after the release of BG1.
It is also crucial to talk about other aspects of the game like the visual design (I've only played the Enhanced edition), killer soundtrack, amazing sound design, and the companion system. I've heard this last one was kind of an afterthought...? It's amazing nonetheless, and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ statement about how to make a rag-tag gang of adventurers feel like real people with so little dialogue . They interact with each other and have their own personality outside of the player's choice: they complain, laugh and critisize the player's decisions, and will leave your party if you do something they didn't like. The way a character is so fundamentally linked to another (because they're married/are best friends/etc), that you need to have them both or neither in your party is a testament of how to design a character with practically no tools.
Like cinema, gaming used to be an art of "smoke and mirrors", where they used certain mechanics, visual or sound cues to make the player feel something or understand something without explicity showing it. Also like cinema, in recent years the capital game developers and distribuitors are willing to invest in a project has grown astronomically. That increase in budget, in RPGs, has been translated into companion NPCs having fully animated, expresive bodies and faces that express their personalities, but more often than not they lack the dramatic or narrative basis that makes a compelling character. The problem has been shifted from the 90s: then, it was compelling characters made of smoke and mirrors, now, they're very pretty animatronics with nothing inside 'em. Companions nowadays make the game. Just take a look at Youtube Channels like Fluffyninjallama, that based their entire career into showing you different reactions companions have to your choices or random banter in games like Mass Effect, Fallout 4, or the recent masterpiece that is Baldurs Gate 3.
I loved Baldurs Gate 1, but I would only recommend it to people who are willing to spend time and sweat into understanding the game and playing by its rules. Not to say it's clunky (it is), but rather demanding. You need to understand its complicated, unexplained, bulls**t 90's Dungeons and Dragons mechanics to play the game (or you can play in story mode difficulty, completely valid). I don't wish to drag too much on this, but I love when a game forces you to master it, rather than rounden up its edges to result in an insipid experience. When a game has tact, taste and its own characteristic flavour, you develop a special relationship (stockholm syndrom, that is) with it, imbuing itself in your brain.
Before playing this game, I'd recommend a new player to experience newer Classic RPGs (CRPGs) like Divinity 2, Baldurs Gate 3 or even Dragon Age Origins. If you're interested in this game, playing the others will not make this one feel like such a big step.
Best case scenario, you're left craving for more. Worst, you're filtered off.
Just don't start by IceWind Dale like my poor cousin did, got it?