Why not just get the GOG version? It has what, 3 characters less in it?

I actually wasn't aware of that. It looks like they're still planning releases on those other platforms, though.

Yes!

Well, I am not impressed, but I am ok with it. (On my way to Bandit Camp)

I think people are looking at BG1 through nostalgia rose-tinted glasses. I've never played the first one, so I thought BGEE would be a good opportunity to finally catch up.

What I found was a subpar plot, shallow character interactions (there is very, very little dialogue between the protagonist and the party members, they hardly say anything), extremely unbalanced combat (either it's extremely easy to kill something or crazy difficult when it's mostly up to lucky rolls) and a lot of wide, empty maps.

I will be the first to admit that BG2 deserves the high spot it gets in the gaming annals but this one not so much

Most of those flaws can be fixed with mods, there is that adds NPC banter and quests like in BG 2, and[url=http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=914] another that makes the combat more interesting. Mods do plenty of other interesting things as well.

Unfortunately, the people from Beamdog didn't see fit to use any of this either directly or as an inspiration. The result is obviously very sub-par compared to a well-modded BG 1.

What you're saying is true, but I have to say it is putting lipstick on a pig at some point. BG was always overrated. I'm not saying I hated it, I just thought it wasn't really a lot better than games that get quite a bit of undeserved hate, like TOEE (which only really deserved hate for it's unstable bugs and crashing at launch, that's justified of course).

First BG was a good game, imho. I read recently a few reviews when the game came out, and people were astonished. The game was beautiful, the combat was challenging, characters memorable.

But I agree that it's BG2 that deserves the spot in GOAT games committee. If you played BG2 first and then played BG1, you were probably disappointed.

But I don't want to jump on that "BG sucks vs BG rox" bandwagon. I enjoy playing first BG to this day. The only thing I fucking hate in this game are respawning enemies.

Baldur's Gate 2 , on the other hand, is amazing till this day, and multiple mods made it even more amazing. I think many people who say "BG defined the genre and is the best RPG ever" actually mean the sequel.

Apparently the difficulty and weak story is also a reason TOEE is generally looked down upon, at least that's what I've read.

In the world of fiction, it's more poltically correct to praise the original of a series even if the sequel was better. :P

Agreed. For a company's first attempt at a massive RPG, Bioware did quite well with BG, IMHO. Then they put a lot of thought into how they could make the sequel better. And that is exactly what they did.

They weren't allowed to alter the original content to much.

It's really no more difficult than any other D&D game from that era, and if you explore there's actually a lot of hidden crap to help you. Those that charge along the obvious path as fast as possible will probably suffer as a result.

It does have a weak story, no more so than IWD which is generally praised. It goes without saying that they all beat the storyline of the Gold Box games.

TOEE had a lot of issuses, biggest of which was that it was clearly released highly unfinished. The biggest pointer to this is the actual Temple of Elemental Evil, which doesn't even feel like the lair of the villain, as it has almost no enemies in it. It's the most boring area of the whole game. Then there's those small game play issues, like not seeing the characters well behind walls, which can make combat a bit difficult.

I agree to an extent, BG 2 is certainly a much better game than BG 1, and I think many people like the original largely by association.
However, it did help revive the RPG genre along with Fallout, and it was the first game using the Infinity Engine used in BG 2 and Planescape: Torment. It does deserve credit for that, and it's still a good game, with an interesting story (though it only becomes interesting fairly late in the game).

The reason doesn't really matter, the fact is that the "Enhanced Edition"'s content and graphics are worse than a well-modded BG 1.
Therefore, asking $20 for it is nearly obscene, and is quite clearly a blatant cash grab from fanboys. It would've been better to just stick to porting the game to tablets instead, they would have avoided losing a lot of goodwill from people like me.

Based on what I've seen so far, I think that's exactly what they did.

What most people don't realize is that writing portable code that can easily be ported to another platform isn't exactly trivial. This is especially true if the application wasn't written to be portable from the start. When the original BG was written years ago, I seriously doubt it was written in such a way that would have allowed for an easy port to another platform. As a result, the driving reason behind all the rewritten components (engine, etc) was likely ease of portability in addition to other things that they've claimed (performance, etc). If you really don't start from the beginning with being portable, it's not something you can usually go back and fix at a later date, it just has to be rewritten.

I'm not exactly pleased with the end result, but I can appreciate how hard it is to take an old codebase from over 10 years ago and try to make it portable. Things have changed a lot since then and, as I mentioned before, it's hard even with new code bases today. So I give them credit for doing that, but they should have delayed the release so that everything could be tested rather than have a sub par release that happens to be easier to port.

This is a real shame though, they could have earned a lot of faith from customers by having a good release, but I lost faith in their ability to release things the way that they should.