In the final (BG:EE) I've just came in and sluaghetered him with no tactic, it took me less than a minute to do it, I didn't even killed his companions (normal difficulty) - is this supposed to be this way? The biggest badass and also one of easier fights?

Everything is way overpowered in the enhanced editions. You would not have had that easy a time in the original, far from it.

WOW. Congratulations. It is true that EE made everything a lot easier but Sarevok is still one mean bad guy. Killing him that easily is an astonishing accomplishment. Well done!

I just summones stiff to keep him busy, and had everyone just pepper him with missile attacks.

The game had balancing issues before the EEs. When you got to the end game your party can steam roll just about anything.

Yeah but in the classic version you had to earn the levels to do that. In the EE version you can beat the game with a much lower leveled party.

Whereas you can steam roll just about anything at the beginning of an EE game. Right.

Yep I'm gonna try original saga next time, with bad character maybe.

BG/BG2 engine comparison (since EE shoves BG into BG2 engine):

https://lilura1.blogspot.com/2017/08/Baldurs-Gate-2-Changes-and-Additions.html

And here is how they changed IWD, too:

https://lilura1.blogspot.com/2016/12/Icewind-Dale-Enhanced-Edition-Review.html

Enjoy.

That's a nice read, thanks!

And no way Sarevok was easy in the original BG1. He was really OP and would slaughter your tanks. I have a hard time to believe that anyone would be able to take him down in the first trial without any previous experience with Black Isle games.

You're welcome. My retrospectives and pro-tip write-ups are only for the original Baldur's Gate, as released by BioWare. This is the only authoritative version of Baldur's Gate, and it has been standard for 20 years. Unlike the wiki and most other sites, my retrospectives and pro-tip write-ups contain no admixture of EE.

It is funny that, for BG's 20th anniversary, all the big mainstream sites wrote retrospectives based on the EE version of the game, which came out in 2012. They could not even write about BG for long: they had to write about BG2 in a BG retrospective. It isn't BG2's anniversary, though.

One and all, these "journos" are jokers.

Who've probably never played the original Baldur's Gate. Jokers is right.

They probably just followed the Beamdog line, which is that the original BG is not compatible with modern hardware/OS.

And yet, for 20 years now, I've run the original BG on myriad systems, without issue, not a single compatibility-related issue. NVIDIA and ATI GPUs, Intel and AMD CPUs, Windows 98 to Win 8.1. EDIT - I think at one point we were running 95, actually.

My game loads in 1 sec flat (I disabled intro FMVs), loads and saves in 1 sec flat, and runs at full frames. Can't say that for the BG:EE, which is still being patched and updated after 5 years. 2.6 glitched out for some people: required non-trivial workaround due to load/save taking 3 minutes. What a joke. Also, they just patched 60+ spells that weren't playing by the rules... 20 years later. And those are all Beamdog-injected. Well, those spells have long been fixed for the original (Dudley's, plainab's). And Baldurdash fixed most of the quest bugs back when Geocities was a thing.

It's 2019 and here I am covering the original BG (+mods), based on the original-disc installs bought in 1998 (now ISO'd because they were getting scratched).

He was way harder in the original.