Considering that in BG2 you start hitting on her right as she's mourning her husband, you could theoretically just kill Khalid and be done with the whole thing sooner. :P

And to contribute to the topic, today Trent Oster clarified that internet connection will not be required to play. Installing the game however, will require you to be online and enter your Beamdog credentials.

Add me to the list of people who are pretty underwhelmed by BGEE at the moment. Initially I was really excited. I never expected them to do radical things with the game like change the graphics or the ruleset. Heck, I didn't want them to do those things. But I was hoping that the extra content and enhancements they provided would provide significantly higher value over what the modding community has already produced.

And I have to admit, a few weeks ago already as I was thinking about it I realized, "Boy, that's going to be hard. The modding community has already addressed a bunch of bugfixes and provided a ton of extra content (yes, some of questionable quality, but I think people are overestimating how "great" Overhaul's stuff will be as well, sorry to say)." Now the announcement from Overhaul comes in and, not too surprisingly, it is indeed a bit underwhelming.

Add to all that the fact that you have to buy the Mac and Windows PC versions separately, a pricing model that Steam made archaic long ago, and I'm now much less enthusiastic about it.

I see myself buying BGEE eventually when it's on sale... maybe when it's bundled with BG2EE (assuming that happens) and both are discounted. But until then, I'm probably going to stick with my trusty GOG versions.

Also, as a side note, I appreciate the reasoned discussion about BGEE here. The BGEE forums are full of fanboyish "police" trying to smack down any opinion that questions whether BGEE is providing good value for the money. The signal to noise ratio is not very good.

I really liked having Jaheria in the party in BG. Kahlid? Not so much, so he pretty much got eliminated as soon as we stepped out of the Friendly Arms Inn. Same with Dynaheir.

You misunderstand me, good sir! I never said I wasn't proud of it! :)

Did anyone ever make a mod that allowed you to break up the various couples in BG?

It's one of the many optional game-play tweaks of Sword Coast Stratagems on Gibberlings3. It's a mod to make the game harder, mostly by making the AI more intelligent, but you could install the mod and just say yes to only this one component, if that's what you want.

Awesome, thanks! I've never used that mod as I'm not a very good tactical player, so the game is hard enough as is!

I have decided that this edition won't be for me. The details that were announced last week didn't excite me as much as I hoped they would and just looking at the project as a whole, it seems to be heading in a direction that will cause the final product to have a number of "features"/issues that will bother me and/or feel out of place in the BG that I know and love.

I'm one of those people who took the better part of a decade before even considering trying a single mod for the game, and even now I pick and apply those modifications very carefully to make sure I stay as true to the original experience as possible, and I like it that way. So, to me, this edition simply takes a few too many steps away from that original experience and that's just not something I'm interested in. I'll stick with my (carefully) modded GOG.com versions.

Don't get me wrong -- I respect what they're trying to do here and admire their team's passion for the genre, but I agree with gammaleak that a lot of people seem to be overestimating the potential quality of the new content that's being added. Maybe the majority of BG fans are so hungry for more content in their beloved game/engine, that they forget to step back and look at the bigger picture, and realize that these games are 12-14 years old and the teams that created them don't exist anymore... What you're gonna get is content by a completely different company who just happen to be big fans of the franchise -- it's never gonna match the quality of the original team and their vision, especially seeing how much of a lightning in a bottle scenario the original BG was -- you can't recapture something like that.

I've said it before, and will repeat it: the overhaul team is in part composed of the same people who have been working on the original Baldur's Gate. The exact number of original BG developers working on BGEE is unknown and varying, but in the past it has been as high as 8 people.

Regardless of that, the new content probably will not feel like playing the old content. But neither did Tales of the Sword Coast or Baldur's Gate II. If that's a problem for you then you probably shouldn't play this edition.

I admit, I have similar sentiments myself, but the way I see it is it will not matter in the end because despite me having played the new version I will still have my GOG version to fall back on when I need some of the "old stuff" for a nostalgia rush.

Yeah I'm aware of this. Should probably have mentioned it in my post.

The way I see it, it's nice that some of the original guys are on board, but it's been 14 years for them as well, and Beamdog/Overhaul is a completely different company with different leadership and, contractually, working under a very different situation... So their presence doesn't really mean that much -- it's not like, between the ~8 of them, they can just recreate the dev. environment/atmosphere that resulted in the original game's greatness. It just doesn't work like that. They were probably just guys looking for a job -- I doubt any of them quit there jobs because their dream was to "enhance" a 14 year old game that was already a huge critical and commercial success.

Fair enough. I'm fairly sure the new content will be different from the original game in "feel" but as I said, I don't mind.

In other news, today Kotaku has published an article that has 3 samples from the new BGEE sound track composed by Sam Hulick of Mass Effect fame:

http://kotaku.com/5931279/a-tasty-sampling-of-the-new-baldurs-gate-music

I like how themes from the original have been worked into some of those tracks.

That's not quite true...

"Activate-on-install" will mean having to re-activate if your hardware changes significantly - "significantly" depending on how strict the DRM check is. With Two Worlds' activation (non-GOG version) just adding RAM would trigger re-activation. So it's not as if anyone will be able to install BGEE and never have to worry about activation issues in future.

This applies to every "activate-on-install" system, not just BGEE - without such a check, people could just activate then transfer their activated copies to as many systems as they wanted, or make them available online. Which would then effectively make it DRM-free.

I'll be boycotting BGEE for this alone - had the original BG series used such a system, then it's very likely that no-one would have been able to play it following the near-shutdown at Interplay.

I'm also underwhelmed by the content changes, but with the original art assets lost by Bioware, area changes would have required redoing them from scratch.

I think it would make a difference whether the person that is trying to date Jaheira actually killed her husband or just happend to be around when he was killed by someone else. ;-)

To me that would be a deal breaker. I don't buy games that have to be activated.

Well you can't be held responsible if Khalid rushes into the fray without his armor on. Silly Khalid, always so forgetful - first put armor on, then do battle. Oh well.

Should I pre-order BGEE or buy both BG1 and 2 here instead? Since both requires the same amount of money to be spent anyway.