Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

It took me 22 years, but I finally finished Baldur's Gate, tonight.
We did it, Boo. By Lathander, we did it.

Widely renown as an CRPG classic, Baldur’s Gate was in fact instrumental in preserving the love and interest in PC RPG games with players in the mid 90’s, when western RPGs were on a brink of ending like the genre of Adventure Games: Sidelined and often forgotten by the masses. It was also the very first successful project for Bioware team, which would later on create a dozen of widely celebrated & classic RPG games of all time. Baldur’s Gate was one of the games that renewed the flame for this genre back then and even now offers an amazing story and tactical Dungeons and Dragons combat experience, if you can handle the old fashioned look and style of play that has been polished with this Enhanced Edition.
“Your iron or your life. No, your iron AND your life. Yeah that one’s better.”
Set in the year 1368DR, when all the cities and ports of the Sword Coast were in turmoil due to Iron Crisis, a young daydreamer along with their sister Imoen were living in the peaceful and secluded village of Candlekeep, doing everyday chores oblivious to the storm brewing outside. Gorion was taking care of these two younglings, until fate decided to knock on the door, and change their lives forever.
Before Baldur’s Gate, Bioware only released one game, a mech simulation called Shattered Steel which, while liked in the MechWarrior community, was rough in many of its aspects. But Bioware was always interested in pushing the limits in games and delivering high level of overall polish. Hence, when developing a game based on beloved D&D license, much of the writing was also handled to the Black Isle Studios, developers that would later on form Obsidian Entertainment, which also spawned many cult favorite RPG. A mix of these two developer studios have created on of the best “old-school” role-playing game series to date.
Baldur’s Gate is a high fantasy RPG game, with clearly defined good and bad guys, fantastical realms where magic is commonplace, and a sprawling and straightforward story about the Hero’s Journey with a couple of clever twists and turns to spotlight the main character’s unusual history that would influence the balance of powers on the continent of Faerûn.
“Hide away that which should not see the sun’s light”
Powered by “Infinity Engine”, the game provides a beautifully detailed 2D isometric background and animated sprites that to this day look endearing to behold. Every area has unique hand-drawn and painted, high-quality graphical presentation, thus making every level look like a pastel painting. Equally captivating is the orchestral soundtrack by the talented composer Michael Hoenig who also created many memorable movie soundtracks, and here most of the tracks deliver emotionally fueled tones that can be enjoyed and listened separately from the game. From renaissance fair-like track of “The Friendly Arms Inn”, imposing and mysterious tones of “Night Falls on Baldur’s Gate” while exploring the vast city and the Jewel of the Sword Coast, to the exciting and desperate combat music of “Gorion’s Battle” where every wrong move can cost you everything.
Make no mistake; combat in the Baldur’s Gate series never was oriented toward casual and action connoisseurs of RPG’s. Like the rule system it’s based on – Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it is highly tactical and complex, slow and deadly. The first game especially rewards carefully positioning of your party members, using their unique skills and spells to control the flow of combat and masking their flaws and shortcomings before the enemy AI quickly discovers it and punishes you by constantly striking these weak spots. It is a real time isometric combat system that you can pause whenever you wish to give your fighters commands and then see the results of your planning. When you start with your character at level 1, every combat is a life or death situation, no matter how trivial some of the enemy encounters might be. By the time you reach level 5, you’ll have a character that can take a beating and can survive a couple of poor combat choices, but your mistakes will always cost a lot, usually ending in party wipe. Speaking of your party, companions that follow you have an AI of its own, but you’ll quickly realize it simply won’t fight well enough and for them to truly shine, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands.
“Our iron no good! Crumbles like elf bones and make our clan into laughing stock! Ha ha, big joke… We kill you quick, no pain”
Every character you meet, every companion that joins your cause, and every enemy that promises your quick demise are well developed with consistently high quality writing on the display that is short, expressive, to the point and playful enough. The overall story and most of its quests are simple by today’s standards, but the confidence of the writing team always manages to pull you into this dynamic world scarred with intrigues, wars, love and betrayals.
Enhanced version delivered by Beamdog is an optimization and greatly improved coding masterpiece that delivers widescreen resolutions, better 2D sprites, reduces the colossally long loading times the original had, and fixes nearly all limitations and bugs the old engine had. It also delivers a couple of new interesting companions that can join you, new levels and quests that will demand you know combat and tactics exceedingly well. The only baffling decision in enhancing this game and the only thing that bugs me about this game is the replacement of 3D cutscenes that were lovingly created in now low-polly resolution with lifeless and cheap cartoon cutscenes that look like something out of the early Flash games. Beamdog also created recently a full-scale expansion “Siege of Dragonspear” that is okay, with the only major minus being subpar and stilted dialogue and writing when compared to the original game and unimaginative and repetitive combat encounters.
“Die, pipsqueaks!”
Do I recommend it? Absolutely, but do keep in mind I’ve been playing this game a dozen of times so far. Should you play it? If you are looking for a tough and no-nonsense RPG similar to D&D tabletop experience with a bit of “Lord of the Rings” vibe, then look no further, but if you’re not ready to commit to nearly 100 hours long epic journey or the highly punishing tactical combat is not something you enjoy, as you mull over your character’s next move for 10-15 minutes, you might want to skip it since it’s not for everyone. Baldur’s Gate has aged well, but it demands a lot out of its players and in return delivers one of the best role-playing experiences out there. It has influenced generations of player and developers, and to this date you can find a bit of Baldur’s Gate magic in nearly every western RPG.

For the newcomers to this game: expect one giant exploration based rpg. There is an entire coast of areas to discover, including the city of Baldur's Gate, with lots of random stuff and quests. In addition, while the gameplay system might seem daunting if you are not familiar with tabletop rpg's, expect to spend hours figuring out what works for a character and what doesn't, which spells are effective when, how to approach certain enemies etc. At least half of the fun of the game is in exploring the system as much as the story and areas.
For the experienced: Do yourself a favour, and replay this with the EE, together with the mods BG1 NPC project and Holic's 3.5 remaster of this game, with basic AI enhancements from SCS recommended. This will breathe new life into the game, and boosts a lot of classes and combinations that used to be weak in the original version.
Especially I welcome the 3.5 mod's balanced approach to classes, items and feats. It is a hell of a lot of fun to explore the new feat system, the new abilities and the new spells as well as the new NPC classes. In addition, I feel with its revamped attack-per-round system and the changed stacking of dex bonus with armour the game is much more enjoyable, and a lot of classes that used to be very weak (without a dual class splash of fighter) are now much more effective, notably clerics and thieves. I must warn that the first two levels before you get to lvl 3 are also much more deadly! Liberal application of Sleep is recommended, and luckily druids also get that spell now!

I recommend everyone play Baldur's Gate, but possibly not this version.
The "Enhanced Edition" rerelease of Baldur's Gate has many convenience features that make the game easier to play from a modern standpoint, but at arguably too high a cost. Beamdog has not only removed around half of all the cinematics in the game, but also replaced the other half with (usually) pleasant-looking but shorter and blander substitutes. The humor, character and dynamicity of the originals are gone, unless you restore them with mods.
This is a theme that carries over to the rest of the Beamdog's "enhancements" as well—most come with a cost in character, usability, and/or vision. Someone at Beamdog must have a real chip on their shoulder about BG1, because they oddly and for no good discernible reason went through the entire game and redesigned many small gameplay systems and content with little to no regard to BioWare's vision or understanding of the original design's purpose. These changes include removing the outer gates of Baldur's Gate and other similarly arbitrary measures.
They also changed the original engine to the BG2 one, and neglected to port over the original character sprites, so the rerelease uses the sprites from the wrong game. Another side effect of this engine port is that they forgot to restore many small engine features from the original game that lacked from the sequel, like ambient character sounds for NPCs and creatures. This version lacks many such features from the original.
In version 2.0, they remade the UI engine from scratch, and in the process they introduced a humongous number of bugs and usability issues to it. In over four years, they haven't even started working on fixing these problems, despite early on promising to the player community that they would fix them. Since then, they've started a large number of other development projects and extracted almost all resources from the Infinity Engine games, ensuring that the countless bugs and regressions they've introduced to them will never be fixed.
That said, the original game is old and has its own long set of (mostly technical) issues. Unfortunately, it's difficult to say which version of the game is the best, as they all have their own drawbacks and it ultimately comes down to preference which ones you can tolerate the best. Still, if you think the issues I've listed about BG:EE would bother you, then I recommend you play the original version instead. Hopefully, at some point in the future, BG gets the remaster it deserves.

One of the greatest RPG's ever made, though it's sequel is better. The Enhanced Edition brought many of BG2's improvements back to the original, and the net result is a huge positive. For best results, install the Enhanced Edition Trilogy (EET) mod to combine all adventures - BG1 + SoD + BG2 ToB - into a single game.
Highly recommend.

Absolutely fantastic RPG. Played it for the first time in 2020, so no rose tinted glasses here.
Now let's start BG2 :)

Played a little, I guess it's ok