Screen can get busy with characters and particles. Zooming in can help you make more sense of the situation in case that does happen (while it happens rarely, it really does)

Not the point. Each party member gets his/her own colored selection circle, you can therefore tell at a glance who's who without having to look at portraits in case of similar color scheme/equipment.

And more importantly, the original question was whether EE features can be replicated with mods. They can't.

Find in my previous post where I even implied, let alone actually said, that the Enhanced Editions are objectively worse. I was giving information that I thought was relevant to Niggles' inquiry. Whether or not the information I provided would allow Niggles to mod the original versions to "get them up on par (if not better) than the EE" would be up to Niggles to judge. Hence the "Whether or not doing all this makes the original games on par or better than the Enhanced Editions is obviously a subjunctive opinion that each individual would have to answer for themselves," portion of my response.

I own all the Enhanced Editions here on GOG, I've played them much more often than the originals since the release of the EEs. The only things I dislike about the 2.0 versions of the EEs are the huge changes to GUI and the fact that certain mods aren't currently compatible with them (I expect eventually mods will either be updated or created that specifically address these issues). I have no problem with any of the so called "political" issues in SoD, it seemed to be making Mt. Everest out of Death Valley to me, though how the ending of SoD was handled between the defeat of the Big Bad to the ending cinematic greatly irritated me.

You misunderstand, I didn't intend to suggest that you personally think something - what I meant to say is that I believe EE to be objectively superior, feature-wise, to modded BG1. Of course, EE also has bugs and new content which might be undesirable. Then there's the question of whether you actually want to play BG1 in BG2's engine as there are significant changes, some of them leading to noticeable differences in tone - that applies to both EE and stuff like BG Trilogy

Well, the aswer seems more like: currently they can be replicated at like 90%, except for a few minor things.
Anyway, amen.

I'm not judging anything, so not sure why you're trying to make it about me?

Many people, particularly the loudest ones, are complaining about the expansion are complaining that Minsc is 'ruined' and the trans character is 'in your face' and that these things are unprecedented in BG lore. But those statements don't accurately reflect what is actually in the game, and ignore the actual history of BG and D&D lore. A lot of people are caught up in the mob rushing to condemn. I'm mostly interested in interjecting some facts into the discussion, especially for people who are just finding the thread and running headfirst into the angry jerk echo chamber.

There's certainly good reasons to not like the expansion (bugs, for one thing, although it does make me chuckle to hear people claim to be original BG fans and then complain about bugs like they're the end of the world). But the review brigade targeting Beamdog is immature, foolish, and unhelpful to gamers who actually want to hear what the game is like instead of endless rants about politics.

It's good that they're removing that line, for three reasons:

1) The "joke" is passive-aggressive, and Minsc is a simple, good-natured brute. It didn't suit his character.

2) The reference is too obscure. It's only understood in certain circles and has aged badly, evidenced by all the disclosure notices we now see in the gaming press. "Actually, it's all about ethics in games journalism." Well, yes, it was. Let the meme die with dignity.

3) It advertised the developers' partisan stance and alienated potential customers. Considering that the majority of Gamergate supporters are PC gamers and favour RPGs, it's clear that Beamdog shat the bed.

I have no preference for Minsc having any particular lines. I'm just providing some perspective about what has gotten some people to act like their pets are being killed and eaten in public.

FYI, disclosure notices are not new, even in gaming journalism. And disclosure notices don't do much to address a significant number of the ethics issues in journalism, let alone solving the problem of gaming press largely relying on businesses to support them - gaming journalism ethics is problematic not because of notices, which were always largely around, but because of the structure of gaming journalism.

I have to disagree with your 3rd point. It's not at all clear who GGers are. It's not even clear that all of them played videos games before becoming involved in GG. They certainly weren't playing RPGs back when RPGs were new and very much involved with pushing social boundaries (to be fair, this was often by just ignoring them in favor of whatever the devs wanted to see). Letting people play as whoever they want, or even just mentioning the idea of sex changes was incredibly progressive in the recent past.

A lot of GGers show up to review bomb high-profile things they get told disagrees with their political reviews, but a lot of other very similar stuff that is lower profile and so won't let GG get as much free advertising doesn't get review bombed. GGers really don't turn out en masse for genuine ethical problems, and some organized GG actions have caused ethical issues in the past. So it's very much unclear who GGers are, what their goals are (because often their actions run directly counter to stated goals), etc.

The main things that I seen remain consistent throughout GG are methods.

1) Personal attacks on people they disagree with
2) Attempting to silence people or remove products which promote things they disagree with
3) Rampant rewriting of history (the number of times the GG narrative has changed is astonishing, each time with 'factual' links to back it up!)
4) Carefully avoiding discussing the hypocrisy inherent in using 'being silenced/censored' and 'bad ethics' to excuse silencing and censoring others and demanding that others act unethically

Those disclosures have become very common since the tail end of 2014. Some outlets, such as The Escapist, even enforce them as part of their new ethics policies.

The problem with gaming journalism was and is cronyism. That's why Gamergate happened, and that's why disclosure is necessary - it lets the consumer know about any potential conflicts of interest the reviewer may have. Sorry, I've been staring at this line for ten minutes and all I can see is nonsense. How many times do we have to declare our stance before it sinks in? Even with the schisms, the core issues haven't changed since Gamergate happened: accountability, transparency, and ethical standards in gaming journalism. Remember, this was a consumer revolt. Nobody likes being sold a bill of goods. Are you talking about Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers, and maybe a few others? So what if a few high-profile talking heads weigh in? When both the mainstream media and the gaming press smear gamers, even the layman can tell that something is rotten. What are you talking about? Most of the RPGs I've played - and I've played a lot of them, even playing nothing but RPGs for a while - never blatantly pushed an agenda. Perhaps you interpret things according to your beliefs.

And how new is "new"? The first RPG I played was Beyond Oasis on the Mega Drive, and that's mainly because the Atari 2600 and the Amstrad CPC 464 didn't have much in the way of RPGs. Why would we want "free advertising"? We get enough bad press as it is, albeit undeserved. Some examples would be nice. You just described SJWs more accurately than I ever could have, but you misspelled "SJW" a few times.

There are confusions about the situation of definitive Editions.

QUESTIONS:

1. When I buy the EE editions TODAY , Will I get the Classic versions for FREE on April 29 ? In other words, will my EE editions turn into definitive editions?

2. Will Definitive Editions contain Classic goodies?

I bought a couple of EE editions and want to buy more because I want to use them as a price for a contest in an other game. So I want to know more about the situation of the EE codes I bought today.

Tnx.
Engin.

Definitely yes.

Don't know, you better ask support, since there's no mention of this in the original gog announcement.

Thank you. I tried contacting support but it seems you cant ask a question without sending DxDiag report.

EDIT: Nevermind. It seems, I entered support through game. I could send a question when I started over.

Beamdog, you're hopeless. See you one year later.
PS: fix your damn "Graphics" options ("pixels outline" option, and two options related to health bars) - they are reset to default after game quit.

You said this "If you actually look at the lines people are complaining about, you'll see that it's not ham-fisted at all. "

Since buying this, I have been play BGEE exclusively, and have put many hours into it. I can't decide on a class to play. Crippling alt-itis.