I never had a chance to play it as a kid. I just checked GOG, looks like they only have the "Enhanced Edition" which appears to be universally hated. I looked around but finding the original seems to be as hard as finding the unenhanced Star Wars'.
The Enhanced Editions are great – tons of warts removed, support for modern platforms, and a bunch of nice quality-of-life improvements by some of the original developers.
The company which made them offended some gamergate types awhile back so they perennially get negative reviews but that’s politics rather than a reflection on the work.
I've bought both the original game back when it was released and the enhanced edition some years ago.
I prefer to play Baldur's Gate in the original engine. Sure there are some annoyances (e.g. small stacks of ammunition), but some mechanics work very differently in the Baldur's Gate 2 engine compared to the Baldur's Gate 1 engine and for me that's a dealbreaker. For example the monster summonings or the weapon skills.
If you've never played the original Baldur's Gate, then you will not be annoyed by these differences though. So if you just want to try the game out for the first time, then surely the Enhanced Edition is a good buy.
Ignore the haters. I'm a huge fan of the original BG2, and the EE has all the same stuff. If you don't want to try the new content, you don't have to; it's mostly self-contained.
Coincidentally, I did another solo-sorcerer run through BG2 last weekend. It's still fantastic.
There's talk about some new characters and items that mess up the original "feel" of the game that can't be turned off. I'm trying to read without spoiling anything, that's just the theme I'm seeing.
You can tell those characters to go away in your initial interactions with them. I think there are three. One in the Copper Coronet, one in the Graveyard District (or was it Trademeet? I don't remember), and one in a random encounter when moving between Athkatla districts.
People who say this "ruins" the game are just angry nerds being angry nerds.
BG2 wasn't just great for its time; it's great now.
I yell at that singing ant-eater thing to go away when it shows up in Star Wars, but it never works :) I'll be annoyed enough by the idea, even though I never played the original. I'll pick up the original if I come across it, but if not, I'll just skip it.
Enhanced edition universally hated? Might you be looking at the new baldurs gate game they made recently?
Enhanced edition is just easier to run on newer pcs
The hate for the new Baldur's Gate seems misplaced, too. If you check the reviews on GOG and elsewhere, it seems to be thinly disguised "GamerGate" anger :/ (with some genuine complaints, to be fair)
I read 4 pages of comments on GOG and found not one that matches your description, at all. On page 2 I saw this:
> After seeing how the devs treat customers I'd highly recommend a pass on this and the expansions. There are legitimate issues with the game, but anyone pointing out issues with multiplayer, buggy UI tweaks, game crashing, characters and saved games being corrupted are being called transphobes and having their legit issues deleted. The devs have also gone begging for good reviews and are currently trying to create drama where they should just admit they screwed up. I wouldn't touch this game with a 50' pole. Stick to the originals avoid anything Beamdog has touched.
Well, I haven't re-read the thread now, so maybe it has changed (and maybe some of the flamebait was indeed deleted). Last I checked there were tons of reviews complaining about "politics" and "SJWs". If I remember correctly, there was a concerted effort to bring the review ratings down because of this.
I now actually scanned it all, reading all 1-2 star reviews, though I may have overlooked something, I only found these two:
> they went beyond and started to brake things in attempt to make the game "more socialistic"
which I find hilarious :D But this isn't hilarious at all:
> Amber Scott should be fired for shoveling her cultural marxist bullshit into this game. There's nothing good about this game
but it's literally the only grain of genuine toxicity I found. Maybe I overlooked something, but if GOG deletes reviews that would be an entirely other can of worms. Most 1 star reviews are stuff like
> I get a non specific error code with instruction to contact beamdog support. I haven't heard back.
I found this though, when looking for "gog deleted baldurs gate reviews" (which I assume they didn't do because I think the "gamergate crowd" would be all over that)
> Hi everyone. I usually spend most of my time lurking here, but I'd like to ask a favour. It appears that having a transgendered cleric and a joke line by Minsc has greatly offended the sensibilities of some people. This has spurred these people into action, causing them to decide this is the worst game of all time and give it a zero review score on Steam, GoG and meta critic.
Note how they're not offering actual evidence, either. That this turned them from lurking to posting is all the "evidence" anyone needs. Just painting people with a broad brush in their absence. Not that I have a problem believing that there was a lot of hate, I haven't looked at Steam or Metacritic at all, but I just went through all of GoG, pretty much nada. So it might also be the attempt to engineer a narrative based on a few grains of truth, instead just owning a shoddy product, a la Ghostbusters, and then people develop false memories based on that narrative?
I'm pretty sure they must have deleted them, because I remember reading pages upon pages of reviews complaining about the game's "agenda". Note I wasn't even aware of this so-called controversy so this is how I found out about it: plenty of 1 and 2 stars reviews on GOG complaining about it..
If they are gone now, it can only be because GOG did some cleaning up. I can't fault them.
Speaking mostly about my experience with Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition, but my impression is it's pretty similar for the other games:
The early EE release was a bit buggy. When you're just re-releasing an old game and charging $20+ for it, if it ends up buggier than the original, it tends to attract the "what are you good for?" sentiment.
But
1. They've ironed out the bugs over the years
2. There's loads of nice interface improvements that makes it a much more polished experience.
3. The new content they add tends to be a notch or two below the original game, but I still find it pretty enjoyable and well above the quality of most fan mods. And the new content isn't intrusive; you can ignore it if you want.
4. Obviously, it's much more convenient than trying to figure out how to install the original from CDRom, and it's nice that I can play it on Mac or on a tablet these days.
5. The modding community has entirely embraced EE and has for years. I was afraid that I would be unable to install some of my favorite mods when I tried the EE version, but it's actually much easier. If you try to go non-EE, then you're probably going to have more problems with installing stuff nobody has paid attention to in 8 years.
BG2 original (aka "Baldur's gate 2 complete") is included as part of BG2 enhanced edition on GOG, check the description :)
I too prefer the original versions, particularly because there's a mod called Baldur's gate trilogy that combines both games and their expansions into one huge game with a ton of fixes.
