Anyone else thinking of buying this bundle? Or some of them at least? Also, anyone notice that not including The Temple of Elemental Evil in your purchase actually increases the cost of the bundle as a whole? lol

I just bought the whole package.

First, I only wanted to buy Planescape Torment, Baldurs Gate 1+2, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale 1+2. I have played and loved most of them before but don't have them anymore. but as I was about to check out it turned out that I could order the last three games for half a dollar, because of the generous discount. And as you pointed out ,TOEE actually lowered the price!

The bottomline is: if you're thinking of buying some of these game, make sure you check out the extra cost of adding more games to your purchase, you might make a helluva good deal :-D

Uh, well ...

Planescape Torment has a great story, great writing, great characters; mediocre gameplay, kind of falls apart towards the end. If you buy it, check out the mod scene before you play it.

Baldur's Gate has aged horrible, and I don't recommend it as a stand-alone purchase; but if you own both it and Baldur's Gate 2, you can use a mod called Tutu to improve BG1 substantially, then add another mod called the "npc project" to add life to the npc's, the BG2 tweak pack to fix various annoyances, and you have a good game (so far), albeit some game mechanics are still annoying. I haven't played the sequel because I'm still playing the first one. Of course I have no way of knowing how the modded-out BG1 experience will stack up against the remake; since so much of the important stuff is fan-made, I expect that the two will end up being quite different.

Temple of Elemental Evil is an unplayable mess without the Circle of Eight mods, and it has an abusively steep learning curve, especially if you've never played pen-and-paper D&D; never really got into it.

Neverwinter Nights has the blandest vanilla single player campaign I've seen in a long time, but I've been told in another thread that the official expansion pack Hordes of the Underdark is good, and there are a lot of fan-made expansion packs that are supposed to be good, so maybe?

Demon Stone is terrible.

And I've never played the other three.

I love the Icewind Dale series, especially the first game., If you're an old AD&D ruleset nut, you should love it as well. If you're not, it's still a great game. The second one uses a different iteration of the D&D rules, but is a fun ride as well.

NWN is worth it for the multiplayer and the community made modules. There are some stellar ones out there and they alone make it worth the price. The expansions are much better than the original campaign, with the second one (HotU) being the best,

I agree with much of Bad's assessment of the BG games, although I have to say I still like the first one even without mods. But I acknowledge that this is nostalgia speaking for the most part.

Planescape is a classic and if you consider yourself a fan of RPGs, it's a must-play.

Temple of Elemental Evil is excellent with the Circle of Eight mod pack applied. I enjoyed the hell out of it. If you like turn-based game play, you should enjoy it as well.

I own Dragonshard and Demon Stone but haven't gotten around to playing them yet.

I'm curious; what does the Circle of Eight mod do? Would you say it's not even worthwhile to try ToEE without it? I tend to shy away from mods; I'm even playing the original BG without any mods or unofficial patches. Off the top of my head, the only mods I've used in a game were Restoration project in Fallout 2 and All Races mod in Fallout Tactics. And those were only after I had beaten both games more than one time in their vanilla form (especially Fallout 2, which I've beaten probably around 15 times).

Opinions:
BG1 and 2 together (I play with the BGTrilogy mod to make it one big game but Tutu uses the BG2 engine too) are awesome. Mods add to replay value too.

I'm playing Icewind Dale now - it's great too. Lighter on towns and heavier on dungeons than BG but lots of fun to play.
Haven't played IWD2 yet.

Demon Stone is mostly a button masher, arcade hack-em-up. It has the redeeming feature of Patrick Stewart's narration but limited gameplay. There are 3 characters to swap between at will (and the ones you don't control will use their own AI to get themselves killed (or not) but as soon as anyone dies it's over). At least they each have a different skillset to make them useful.
Not an rpg, though there is limited levelling up and buying of items in a between levels screen.

Haven't played Dragonshard yet. there are 2 versions of the mod - one is just bug-fixes the other is that plus new content.

I haven't gotten around to playing TOEE yet myself but, from what I hear, it's a buggy mess without the CO8 fixes but a good game with them.