Baldurs Gate "Enhanced" Edition [may contain SPOILERS]

[Eliasfrost]

Alright, so BGEE was released just a few days ago and I got it on release day in hopes of it being a justification of the original game, it seems that I was somewhat keeping my hopes a bit too high. Ok, so I have been a fan of the BG series for a very long time and I just replayed BG1 using TUTU and to be honest, it's almost better than BGEE if it wasn't for Black Pits (that I enjoyed quite a bit).

BGEE is a buggy mess with lacking features and it's poorly adjusted to the new engine, some classes become completely useless and some weapon specifications are not even playable (because said weapon does not exist in the game, like katana), they did alter the beast specialization for rangers though so that's nice.

The developers claim there to be over 400 improvements to the game and engine, either I'm stupid or I just missed them, the UI is a mess and outdated, with the new engine, they could at least have done something about the blocky oversized UI that belong on the 90's, their proudly presented wide screen support is glitching up with stretched areas of the UI and various elements getting distorted, which is unacceptable.

There are some major issues that the devs really should have thought about before releasing it, and I don't understand how they could've missed some of these even though the pushed the release date once. The most obvious flaw that comes to mind is the lack of increasing game speed, you know the first time you started BG and the game ran so slow you could see each individual frame play as if the game experienced major lags? Guess what, you can't open the config tools (there is none) and change that frame rate to something more appealing, which is kinda retarted concidering most BG players play with a frame rate of at least 40.

There are some other minor glitches that get really annoying after a while, like that you can only scroll the buyers menu in the trade window but not your own inventory menu. And that the journal scrolling is glitched and flicker around for no reason. These are things that you do a lot in the game that need to work otherwise it's just tedious and a sign of sloppy design, I'm disappointed.

Sorry to say it but BGEE is a mess and needs a lot of things fixed before I can truly enjoy it like I did with the original (or TUTU), I highly recommend you to buy the games on GoG (it's rather cheap) and install the TUTU mod to play BG1 with the improved ToB engine instead of BGEE.

Sorry for the long rant, I just felt like I needed to ventilate somewhere.

What's your thoughts on the new BGEE?

http://www.baldursgate.com/

[maheusz]

I did see that they were releasing the Enhanced Edition BG, but I didn't really felt interested in it. Mainly from reasons you're mentioning. The mods already did what they're trying to do with it. Better and cheaper. The only thing I may be interested in are new classes and new NPC with their own storylines - how they're holding on? Any good ones?

It was pretty obvious that they're going to fuck this re-edition up. Why? Because before release these people were asked about re-drawing the textures, making it more HD-like. Answer was that original character models were lost and it would take too much time to make them from the start. I was like 'What?! Then why is it called Enhanced Edition?'. A cash grab that is, nothing else.

To tell the truth I'm more (cautiously) interested in Project Eternity that was kickstartered some time ago than this mess.

[Eliasfrost]

I haven't actually tried the new companions because I wanted to play it vanilla style so that I could get a good understanding of what was actually improved and what was missing, but I heard that the new companions are really amazingly done, and have romance subquests, so that's really nice, I wish they did some overhaul for the old characters, but they didn't which is a shame.

Yeah, it was intended to be a more of a enhanced version of the original to work better on new systems and to be more appealing to new gamers, only they did it worse with bad textures (BG2 UI looks nicer), muddy fonts and display glitches all over the place. To me, the presentation is just as important as the content, so the decision to remove the cinematics and replace them with cartoon style motion comic really made it seem less serious, they even removed the quote from the title : "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster... when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you". I really hated that, because that quote really set the theme of the whole BG saga, and they removed it.

I can't agree more, concidering the brains behind PE and the amount of resources they gathered on Kickstarter I'm pretty confident that Obsidian will deliver on this one.

[maheusz]

Wait, so that means that Imoen was left as it was before? Whiny little girl? No change... well one more thing that'll make me not to buy it. Although new companions and personal quests sure are interesting.

That quote was the best thing in the beginning... it defined the whole struggle. Also shame they 'reworked' the game that way. While cutscenes were outdated for sure they created the atmosphere. Are journal entries also tampered with? I mean these voiceovers which appeared after certain events in the storyline.

I guess it's more like you said - to appeal to NEW players. But then it doesn't make sense to leave the graphic as it is. Because we can't even compare the vanilia ones and newest RPG games (think Witcher, or heck, even Divine Divinity 2, Gothic 4 or Two Worlds 2) and because of that older titles should appeal with other things... but also not destroy my eyes with useless UI and bad texturing. Heh, although it seems that my resistance to bad/old graphics is fine, because one of my friends refuses to play UFO: Enemy Unknown because of it's interface and pixelation.

[JeffTheShark]

i went onto amazon.com and purchased a box-set of the original and sequels to baulders gate + the dlcs. and playing baulders gate with a melee based warrior-class with heavy use of imoen... was entertaining... to say the least... so first i jimmied the hell out of my starting cash to buy some semi decent armors, and a shield, stole a nice sword. i went through the starting story-line, talking to my foster father, watching him get cut down my ogres, talking with imoen... then finally i meet my first enemy, a gremlin or something. i ran at it as imoen stopped and took aim with a bow. a swung with all my might and... my sword split harmlessly in half. something about the iron plague or something. so i ended up beating the thing to dead with my bare hands, and set off for these mines to ratify this horrible sword steel issue. despite this minor setback, i still managed to resolve it, and run through the story with some ease. and guess what, i'm a NEW PLAYER. and i played the ORIGINAL OLD ASS GAME. AND IT. WAS. FUN. so damn developers! i played this OLD ASS GAME, on my NEW ASS PC, and ENJOYED IT, without your fancy new graphics, redesigned characters etc. so screw you!

[maheusz]

For anyone interested Kikoskia is doing an YT Let's Play of Enhanced Edition Baldur's Gate as Lawful Evil Fighter.

Just putting it out here. And since he knows the game pretty well his opinion can be valuable. Ah, but I don't know if he'll be getting any of the new characters to join.

So that's that.