Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

Hello everybody, PurplePike here. After dipping my toes into the CRPG genre with games such as Baldur's Gate 3: The Thirdening, the original Fallout, and Divinity: Original Sin II, I was curious to experience more games in the genre and find out what dastardly war crimes awaited me within. Suffice it to say, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced HD Remastered Remake GOTY Tarnished Bhaalspawn Collector's Edition: The One'ening, was quite the delicious treat. Despite being a game that is OLD AS ♥♥♥♥, this game has a wide variety of quests, companions, weaponry, stats, and other mechanics that I'm sure can be abused and messed with. For example, my team consisted of 2 mages that could cast only basic spells, 3 dudes who were melee and couldn't hit for ♥♥♥♥, and a third sniper that could hit some of the time. How did I beat the game then, you may ask? Well, whenever I saw a group of boss enemies, I would send in my sniper, tease them with arrows, leave to the bottom room, and then gank them with my 6v1 until they all were dead. Some may call that cowardly, I all that a "skill issue" on the enemies' parts. I also had a motley of potions and other concoctions that my main guy could take that would actually allow him to hit enemies that could kill them in a few hits, so that was useful too when I was in a pinch. Sometimes my mages would even do something themselves, such as trapping the enemies (and my team members) in spider webs that take MINUTES to free myself from or cast a magical fireball that explodes - and also damages my team members! They were quite useful whenever I didn't know what to do against an enemy and decided to implement the "♥♥♥♥ it" strategy against my foes. This is all to say that in Baldur's Gate, you have the choice to approach situations as you wish. Sure you can play a build that makes sense and is rational, or you can hope your squad of goons can out-goon the enemy goons with trickery and nefarious tactics. I do not think in the later acts I beat any of the boss enemies "normally" and I love that because I beat them with such foul and dubious tactics that were my own plan of deviousness. I applied this ideology to all my quests, NPC's I talked to, everything, all in an effort to beat the game in my own Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition way. Besides that I hear the cutscenes are worse in this version and yeah I'd agree. In summary, the warcrimes I committed in this game were quite swell, 10/10 would fart on the final boss and kill him without him noticing again.

In my humble opinion this is the greatest game to ever exist and has probably shaped my entire life at the very least my love for video games started here in 1998. I may only have 600 hours on steam but i have been playing this game for almost 30 years on different formats and i always come back. So many games from that time are unplayable now because of new graphics and storylines just being so much better but baulders gate 1 and 2 are exceptions to the rule. Now granted Beam Dog did an amazing job enhancing this game making it that much better keeping it relevent and increasing its replayability but Beam dog have also kept everything about this game that made it so great in the first place. Baulders gate was originally made so you could play it 20 times and not have the same experience twice. This game changed how i see the world in the best possible way. When i hear birds chirping in the forest i feel like im in Cloakwood when im in a big city and hear people talking and laughing i feel like im in Baulders gate this game has added magic to the real world for me. Thank you to everyone that worked on this game. To anyone thinking about trying it for the first time ... you will die you will have to load. However just quick save alot and be patient. Explore everything talk to everyone there is so much in this game and i wish i could experience it for the first time again you dont know how lucky you are!

72/100 It's a dated classic, I finished the original game over 25 years ago and recently replayed it, as I plan to play BG3. The Enhanced Edition is still lacking in a lot of quality of life areas, including small font and UI, difficulty seeing more than 2 lines of event history, no map suburb names in the city of Baldur's Gate, spells not working as described, poorly described mechanics (your gem bag holds much more than gems, for example - it also holds necklaces and rings), etc. The pathfinding, particularly in tight areas, is dreadful with characters frequently getting stuck. The difficulty is all over the place, particularly for the final battle with Sarevok. What is the point of spending 80 hours levelling up your characters to level 7, just to face level 15 bosses who are immune to most of the things you've spent days and hours accumulating. It's just broken game design - there are far better games out now. It's a classic and large parts (particularly up to Chapter 5) are enjoyable to play, it led the way 25 years ago, but it has been superceded by (and I'd recommend instead) newer RPGs like Pillars of Eternity, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, The Witcher 3 and Zelda: Breath of the Wild over this.

Exploring dungeons, managing your party and progressing through dialogue trees is where the game shines the most. I really like that it is ready to play within a couple seconds, too. I have to admit that one of my main problems with the game was actually starting and continuing to play it. Hitting the Play button here often deletes multiple hours. Commitment issues, much. Overall, it's a classic that will always offer a good experience if you give it a chance (and if you don't mind reading). 'You must gather your party before venturing forth', Hamster noises intensify as it goes for the eyes, and such. A couple nitpicks: - Class related abilities are explained through NPCs in the starting area (among other mechanics), but based on your character there is no way to immediately see them in action. So, you're likely to forget about them until you meet specific party members that have them, which may not happen until the DLC in some cases. It would be nice to have better documentation for this in-game. - Party members run into each other and get stuck often while exploring, which slows down the experience significantly. Given the already slow base movement speed, leaving an area can take a minute. - The DLC's Menhir stones sidequest is bugged and softlocks if you fail at one of the stones' interactions, making it impossible to complete without quickloading or using the debug console. [hr][/hr] 100% achievement completion is quite the demanding journey here. It means beating the base game and the DLC campaigns with every possible ending. It means quickloading through save files to finish sidequests in every way possible. It means making very specific (and easy to miss) decisions throughout entire DLC playthroughs. It means collecting the right combination of gear, potions and spells to min-max your stats. It means beating the base game on the highest difficulty. Overall, it demands commitment, but every step on this journey brings joy.

Crunchatise me Captain! Due to the fact of how many times I have gone through the intro of Baldur's Gate 3, the constant restarts did a number on me and as a result, I decided to go back to where it all started, with AD&D, THAC0, and a dream. Where Minsc told Boo to go for the eyes. Where you must gather your party before venturing forth. Where his hotel is as clean as an elven arse and so many other things. To put it simply, I will say that the game hasn't changed a bit, but I will say, when I was 9, I can safely say I understand what the hell I was looking at and despite it's age, the story has aged like a fine wine with only a few crow's feet popping up in regards of execution. As because it relies upon EXP to level up, each class levels up at different paces. Where Thieves level up like a madman, while Mages take their sweet time. I can understand why as despite how squishy they are(where that caltrop die you use for your dagger in D&D is a Mage's hit die), can break the game in half once they get going. That being said, with my rambling, I can say that once I understood the system unlike the time I played it as a kid, it is still crunchy, but satisfying, like chewing on some delicious beef jerky. That being said, if you want to get started, go for the Fighter. Enjoy travelling the Sword Coast at your own leisure and may your dice always roll nat 20s

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It takes time to figure out the controls on a Steam Deck. L trigger is right-click, R trigger is left-click, left paddle is maps, right paddle is inventory, right trackpad to move cursor, left trackpad to zoom. There may be more that I haven't figured out. The game gets WAY more fun once you know how to use it.

In short: It's a 1998 remastered for the 21st century, however I still think this game is still far too old and outdated to really be enjoyable for a modern audience. First of all, it's slow, really really slow. It takes ages to do anything, exploration is a slog, and for most of the game it wants you to explore large maps that really only have like at most 3 small encounters and a tad bit of loot. You'll spend a lot of time not really doing much. There isn't really a lot of proper dialogue and your team might as well be mutes. The plot is okay? It's got a lot of intrigue and stuff but it's nothing special. I mean... you can be a goody two shoes or some evil dude? There are just a lot of really short uninteresting side content plotlines dotted around the map as well, and the only reason why you'd need to do it is so you can get a specific item or XP, which is only needed because the game will annihilate you if you aren't a high enough level. Combat is a bit finnicky, and the game will start you off at such a low level that many fights can literally end your run within seconds if you aren't looking. Game design has clearly moved light years beyond what was conceived in the game, and it shows. You'll either spend several hours trying to get into the game, then doing the same thing again after a couple of months of years, or you'll give up. If you look at the completion rate for achievements, most people, that is nearly 55% of players don't even reach the first major location, that being the Friendly Arm Inn, and that is right at the start of the game. Only 26% of players even finish the first major plotline in Nashkel mines. There's a lot of breadth, not a lot of depth and a whole load of complex systems and mechanics. It's fine for me, there are plenty of guides out there, but for the average player who wants to enjoy, and I do mean enjoy a well written fantasy adventure, a lot of this game is outright far too archaic and inaccessible. There's a lot of nostalgia-baiting glaze, or sometimes downright arrogance around the game, as if it's some kind of mystical book that only the veterans of the genre can understand. Nah. If you had a billion hours to waste sitting on your arse slowly trudging through whatever this game is, then it might be for you. No hate of course, but it's a requirement for this game.

Tl;dr: The game's highlights are stretched so thin by excessive random encounters, superfluous content, and sluggish pacing that the average quality of the experience per hour is no longer high enough to justify the time investment. Baldur's Gate II (+ Icewind Dale) and Neverwinter Nights I & II are my favorite RPGs (excluding action RPGs and open-world RPGs). The strengths of these titles can also be found in Baldur's Gate 1: - Combat System. - Number crunching & character developement - Some memorable stories. - Music. However, Baldur's Gate's strengths are overly diluted - or even drowned - by superfluous filler material: - Tons of enemy respawns/random encounters. - Interesting events are spread too thinly across too many maps. - A great deal of slow backtracking. - Too much of the same old content, to the point where it's just intimidating (For instance the city of Baldur's Gate has 13 taverns. No one would have complained if there had been only 7) The game offers so much replayability; you can easily play through it three times with a completely different party, alignment, and difficulty level. Trimming the game down to around 50 hours of the highest-quality content would have done it a world of good. The Devs did a much better job in subsequent titles in this regard. I stopped playing after about 60 hours (my actual playtime). An example regarding pacing: I’m loaded with loot. In *Diablo*: Teleport to base, sell stuff, stash items in the chest. Teleport back. Done. In *Baldur’s Gate*: Fight my way through two random encounters to the edge of the map. Have to rest because I might get ambushed on the way to base. Get ambushed while resting. Fight. Rest again. Fully rested. Start the journey to base. Get ambushed along the way. Fight. Arrive at base. Rest. Sell and stash my loot. Travel back to where I came from. Have to fight my way through three random encounters to get back to my original location. Rest. Ambushed again while resting. Rest once more. Done. Now I can continue.

Baldur's Gates 1 & 2 are two of my favorite games I've ever played. Dated by today's standards, but very re-playable nonetheless.