Hey Guys,
i bought today the Enhanced Edition of Baldurs Gate, due i heard Larian is making the Third Game, and i'm a huge fan of Larian and they never did dissapoint me so far. (Even the RTS Game had it's strenght). If i can be honest, i remember playing this (besides Neverwinter Nights) in my younger Days but i wasn't really impressed rather dissapointed from what I remember, but i still want to refresh hugely on my Memories (due i forgot most things about it) so i'd like to know, even if it might not be onpar with the Original Vanilla Games, do you think for my purpose it will be more than enough and enjoyable?

/edit: Oh as i look through the Forum i found out you also have the original ones(you simply need to redeem them).

Baldurs Gate EE was very enjoyable. Beamdog managed to to it right only with the first game. Mostly right....
The EE edition gives more character creation freedom, better visuals, and many mistakes were fixed. In comparison with the original.

EE adds new companions, they are interesting when you encounter them, but they may seem like an wasted opportunity with there quirks and quests.

Most of the cons will be
Hand drawn cutscenes
Some ... bugs with the added companions
Annoying new mage character who can't cast spells correctly.
Loss of visual style of the original.

The Story Mode is a Blessing and Curse!

It will let you to avoid death so that you can simply play for the "story".
BUT
It seems that beamdog play-tested the game on story mode, so that there will be some very annoying balancing issues even on the easiest difficulty.

Yes. They are bad. Most of the bad stuff happened after their 2.3 patch or whatever it was, when they changed the UI and lots of other things to make the game mobile-phone friendly.

@gogwitcher3
Thanks for the sincerly and honest Answer, i will give it a try =)

Shut the fuck up, you goddamn troll, those changes were good and necessary, you can still play the old versions of the game if you don't like it!

I'm so sick and tired of reading your shit, from you and your anti beamdog brigade, i wish they would ban you from here and your troll companions too.

If you are completely new to the BG series, then yes, I think that the EE versions are a fine place to start. They will run pretty much perfectly on modern systems without you needing to fiddle with a lot of mods and compatibility patches, and you likely will not notice the difference between the original content and the additional quests/characters that have been added by Beamdog, and the EE versions include a slew of awesome QoL changes (the original BG, for example, had no ability to let you highlight interactable objects, so you could miss out on a lot of nice loot if you didn't wave your mouse cursor over every pixel of the screen).

Some downsides of the EE are what gogwitcher3000 mentioned; the change to screen resolution mean that some of the sprites look quite pixelated, or have a noticeable black border around them. It's not gamebreaking, and you'll get used to it after a while, but it is a bit of an eyesore.

I would also highly recommend downloading the mod that restores the original game's cutscenes (rather than the hand-drawn, comic-style cutscenes that Beamdog replaced them with), as the original cutscenes (especially the final end-game cutscene) are MUCH more engrossing, despite their now-dated 90's 3D look.

EEs are not bad. The anger is mostly because, what EEs did, Mods did better. Also, EE's only enhanced the interface and some simple things like most mods do. They didn't chance a single game object or code. So, I wonder what people are talking about when they say EEs enhanced the graphics since they use exactly the same graphics with the originals. That's also why There will never be Icewind Dale 2, because the original code and graphics for the IWD2 is lost. Beamdog can't create a game without the original code or graphics.

There is also the problem with "balance". Baldur's Gate series was never very good at balance but EEs messed it up really bad. The Original BG (Baldur's Gate 1 classic) is a hard game, especially for beginners, while BG:EE is so easy. That's not a bad thing in my point of view.

EE's tried to add some NEW things into the game like new NPCs. You'll notice them right away since they look like aliens in the amazing world of Forgotten Realms. They are not bad, but look utterly out of place with their terrible writing and voice acting.

EEs also do some of things good, especially the quality of life improvements like being able to quickly loot objects, dual wield, you can now carry shield and equip a bow which I LOVE very much.

In summary, if you are a new and/or lazy player, give EE's a chance. But if you want the original intended experience, try the classic that you can redeem. BG1 classic looks ugly in my opinion without any mods. You are warned :)

Nope, played through 1 and 2 on the EE. You could get a similar experience modding but this does it all for you and the arena is fun for build tests.

EEs are terrible in my opinion, and Beamdog even had to bundle them with the originals to sell them. They managed to get the interface and cutscenes so ugly. They changed the engine of the first game, so now it's a completely different experience, way worse in my opinion. Added content doesn't fit with the style of the game, and feels out of place.

I don't have anything good to say about Beamdog, especially after they called the original games "sexist" and lied that bundling with EEs wasn't their choice and goal.

In my experience it doesn't really add enough for the price.
I'm fine with the originals - I'd rather not pay 4x the price to get the exact same game with a resolution boost when the old ones ran perfectly find in scaled windows.

...Though as a footnote, a lot of people were mad about Dragonspear. TL;DR - needless 4th wall breaking politicizing that was extremely out of place.

Hard to say. Most of the people who enjoy the Enhanced Edition didn't really play the originals much, if at all, and so didn't feel as betrayed or disappointed by the missteps that Beamdog made. You, as a fresh viewer will ultimately be more inclined to like it because you don't have a frame of reference to understand what about the game makes it bad.

For example, most of the "Enhanced Edition" are a collection of free mods that we the gaming community had been working on for decades. Beamdog appropriated them all, slapped an "Enhanced Edition" sticker on them turned around and sold them to the consumer. Very little of their content was unique at release, and most of what is unique most people don't want (see: outlines, etc.)

Next, despite the fact that this game had been running smooth as butter for decades, Beamdog managed to make their version nigh unplayable for several months out of release. You were confronted with major game-ending bugs over and over and over. This is what came of them stealing other peoples' code and being too incompetent to implement it right. At its peak there were over six hundred noted and unaddressed bugs on their forums. Even now if you swing by you'll see dozens of them.

This next point really sticks in the craw of a lot of people around here. The Enhanced Editions didn't sell too well, being bug-riddled messes that were charging you for free fanmods. And so Beamdog did customers everywhere the dirty of forcibly bundling the originals with their Enhanced Editions so you could no longer simply buy the originals on their own. Now they could safely pad their sales numbers and claim that their remakes weren't the immense flops that they were. When people got outraged and protested, they bald-faced lied and blamed the distributors like GOG for the change... until they got caught and disproved. I don't remember them ever actually apologizing for being scumbag liars in that situation, but by this time no one was surprised by the lows they'd sunk to. Their forums were already draconian hellholes where criticism and wrongthink were punished with lifetime bans.

Lastly, and most damningly, they just couldn't leave the base characters and content alone. No one wanted "story upgrades" and no one wanted "NPC updates." Just make a newer system for us to enjoy, yeah? But Beamdog went ahead and added a ton of extra dialogue to the NPCs that ultimately changed their core personalities. It was soul crushing to see characters I'd grown up with spouting new lines of dialogue discussing racial intolerance and oppression. Beamdog fans will claim that Beamdog only added new lines, but didn't delete existing ones, therefore they didn't "change" the NPCs. I could never make sense of this reasoning. Would rereleasing Casablanca with a new scene that had Bogart digitally dunking a basketball on the Nazi Major and then winking at the camera not be changing the film, despite them "only" adding content and not deleting existing footage?

Anyhow, all of the above is usually gibberish and unimportant to new players. If none of that bothered you, I say go for it. The damage to Beamdog's reputation is already done and they lost BG3.

They didn't call them sexist, they said there was sexism in them. And there is. And they didn't change any of it - they just bore it in mind when writing new stuff.

Semantics. That's the same damn thing.

BG1:EE was (is?) very poor. I played it once, and did not make it through all of it. Since then I finished the classic edition several times.

Why do I think it is poor?
1. Terribly ugly new interface. Hard to find relevant stats.
2. New companions do not fit in, are really poor, and it is not possible to avoid interacting with them.
3. Original cutscenes have been deleted and substituted by amateurish cartoonish slides.
4. New versions had A LOT of bugs (some might be fixed by now) compared to classic edition.

The situation is very different for Icewind Dale, where I think they did a nice job improving the game experience. But still, I think the they charge for it too much.

And a finally, the company itself is extremely disrespectful to their customers. I will not go into details, but they behaved in the past in a way that is totally unacceptable lying left and right, and calling their potential customers racist/sexists etc.