Well, I was itching for something to play when I’m not at the g/f’s playing Skyrim, so I thought about Baldur’s Gate. And look at this! Enhanced Baldur’s Gate!
Wow, I haven’t played it for 10 years, but I have very vivid memories of it just from reading through this thread and another.
So I was poking around at some reviews, and there seems to be a feeling out there that it’s just as well to buy BG Complete for $5 on GoG, then patch it up , (Edit: add some mods), and you end up with the same thing.
What’s the advantage to BG-E that makes it worth $20?
Maybe the non-GOG version has auto-saving? My son got me the GoG version for christmas and I spent an hour and a half playing last night, before I died and found out there was no auto-save. Back to the beginning…
Yeah’k. I saw that, but there are obvioulsy plenty of folks out there who feel that it’s not worth $20, and it’s a better solution to just mod and patch up the old version.
To simplify my question: Is the Enhanced version a better experience than a modded original BG?
Modding requires time and effort as the engine itself isn’t very mod friendly, so prepare to spend some time with the trial and error game.
Also, mods won’t give you:
Open GL renderer (better performance).
Bugs that aren’t covered by mods/source code bugs (the enhanced version also covers bugs fixed by mods).
Ability to play multi-player on multiple platforms.
NATIVE support for high resolutions. The GUI has been rebuilt to accommodate higher resolutions - with mods you just get ugly stretching. The artwork itself is uprezed via shaders - looks much better.
New cutscenes - which, IMHO look a LOT better than the original CGI work.
Ability to zoom in and out.
So if the hassle of getting mods to work on this old, mod-unfriendly engine and/or if any of the above appeals to you, it might be worthwhile. Is it worth $15 more? It was for me, YMMV.