Baldur's Gate I & II - Gather your party before venturing forth

I have the EE, it's pretty neat, but it wasn't necessary... I mainly wanted to try Siege of Dragonspear.

I mean, you CAN mod. You just have to finish your modded playthroughs before they patch it again since you pretty much have to do a clean install and then reinstall your mods after a patch, and any old saves will then be super wonky with dialogues being all over the place etc so you have to start a new game for everything to work properly again. I think there's a patch coming soon-ish for both BGEE and BG2EE but don't quote me on that, ideally it should then be several months before the next one.

It's really more of a fault with Steam since they're the ones who force updates either automatically or when you next launch a game, there's no option to update when you see fit and keep playing the previous version if you want. I think the GOG version might let you manually choose whether or not to download any patches?

I've played Both BG games, but I have never beaten the Expansion packs Tales of the Sword Coast, Throne of Bhaal). Defeated BG1 all of 1 time, Don't even remember if I ever beat 2, but I did get to the final area.

Only Mod I used way back when was TUTU. Anyone know where that is and if it works on the EE edition?

Oh, and I was playing a female Elf Fighter/Wizard. Yes, she romanced Anomen (took me a bit to realise she also slept with him, as I distincly remember just clicking thru too fast, and not reading the in-game text. I found out about it thru a walkthru).

Good to know. Thanks!

I've been watching the Extra Credits video, pretty interesting.. I think BG1 in general had lots of neat and unique encounters, clearly a lot of effort put into it.

I've started a new game of BG1 and plan to play the whole series, with the new Siege of the Dragonspear. I'm pretty excited about it

I really like the Kivan mod for BG2. I kept his wife alive once and hated her so much that she never got revived after that. That meant I got the Kivan romance content even if I was actually romancing someone else, but that was better than him dying to be with whatsherface. Xan bonded path made me cry so hard.   I heard it's been changed to avoid that now though? Ugh, so much crazy over pixel men.

They changed the menus, character screen and all that.

They changed the sprites into some cartoony pieces of crap that looks terrible. The characters look like cartoon figures glued onto the non-cartoony background of the games now.

The added some horrible Advanced A.I stuff as default. Which means as soon as you recruit a spellcaster NPC, or something like that, the character wastes a spell right away. Casting bark skin on himself or whatever. Which, in some cases, forces you to rest. This is a problem because some of the quests have time limits. If you forget to manually turn off the Advanced AI, you run the risk of having your spellcaster toss a fireball at a single goblin\your own party and fun things like that.

The expansion pack screws up the whole story.

1. Irenicus tries to frame you for murder. If he succeeds the PC will get executed. If that happens....uhm....Irenicus loses. He wants your soul. If you die your soul goes away. Hence why he doesn't try to kill you in BG2 until after he has your soul. Basically this clever bit of writing by Amber Scott managed to turn one of the best villains in gaming history into a moron.

2. Viconia being in the expansion. She clearly states she has spent the months between BG1 and 2 living on a farm near Beregost. Her showing up in the expansion pack contradicts this. There just isn't any time left for her to have lived on that farm.

3. Irenicus giving you those dreams in the expansion pack. The writer claimed it was because he does this in BG2 as well. No he don't. That isn't Irenicus in your dreams, it is the Bhaal essence trying to convince the player to go with the taint. Irenicus himself says he knows nothing about those dreams if you ask him about them in BG2.

4. Safana having a personality change because her being a classic femme fatale character was "a poor representation of women". Yet she goes back to her original personality when you run into her in BG2.

5. Extremely railroaded plot. If you actually kill Dynaheir in the game, she shows up in the next area. All alive and well and ready to join you again happily. Despite her corpse still laying on the ground in the previous screen.

6. Some poorly done forced feminism stuffed into the game. A character walks up to you, and if you are female he yells "Hello wench" or something like that. You get 5 or 6 options for replies to him and all of them are "Get offended". You can't wave the comment away. You can't ignore it. You can't say something clever to turn tables on him. You just get five simmilar options of getting offended. That is just poor writing for an rpg. Very poor. The writer takes control of your character. Wench wasn't even a bad word in medieval times. It was a profession.


In addition to all this, Beamdog has made it impossible to buy the original versions of the game. They pulled a slimey move and had the originals added as "extras" to their own game. So if you want the original games now you can only get them if you pay for the buggy remakes. That is on EA level of messed up.


So, yes. Beamdog shat all over Baldur's Gate and they managed to do harm to the overall story and the characters in the process.

All of those things I either disagree with or consider complete non-issues.


Might have to give this a try. You're sure any patches won't override the "beta" of the old version automatically and force you to switch back to the beta manually? Because the damage as far as saves are concerned would already be done at that point in modded playthroughs.

I was just wondering if Steam would automatically download any updates regardless and assume the player would then switch back to the "beta" themselves, since I doubt their update system would ever take into account stuff like someone wanting to play a modded BG. But if it works like that and it stays at whatever previous version you pick until you opt out of the supposed beta, then great! I'm not at home now but I at least think I remember there being more options than 1.3 to choose from there, and I really just want the option to take as much time as I want to complete a playthrough, reverting back to 1.3 specifically isn't a big deal for me. I assume the expansion won't work though if you revert to 1.3 in BG1

Only possible if you have the game on Steam. If you bought it at the Beamdog store or GoG, you can only get the 2.3(?) version.

It depends on the mod - not all of them have updated versions, but a lot do. There's a well-maintained list of mods that are compatible with the new editions on BeamDog's forums.