Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG1 & BG2 worth it while waiting ?

BGEE is a bit like the Star Wars Special Editions of Baldur's Gate games. Instead of just fixing the game so it wouldn't crash, or just running BG1 using BG2's engine with UI/resolution updates with some QoL features, they also substantially changed a lot of the content and the art direction.

Fortunately its mostly additive and its pretty easy to pick out the 'Enhancements', though I agree the enhanced "movies" are pretty terrible and their enhanced portraits all blow. The portraits in particular just seem amateur, even by BG standards, and I can't help but wonder if I'd like the companions they added a bit more, if they'd just hired some better digital painters? Do yourself a favor and hunt down some portraits you like so you can sub them out. Even the original standard portraits of BG2 were rather disappointing, since they all look like Thomas Kinkade paintings with those garrish pink and gold pastels everywhere. But at least they had a consistent art style.

The first thing I did after installing BGEE was to download the old Icewind Dale portraits so I could use those for some of the BG NPCs instead. When the massive black studios peeps and justin sweet did the original icewind dale portraits they basically cribbed many of the 'character' ideas from BG1/2 for those. So there is an alt for pretty much every BG1/2 NPC in the standard IWD portraits. With Icewind Dale and its sequel they made an investment to hire some stronger concept artists to make the portraits there and it really shows.

Thankfully one of the coolest things about BG was that it made custom portraits, sound barks and ai scripts a thing. So there are a lot of them floating around after 2 decades, many much better than what came with the games initially or in the EE

Ps. I also liked Siege of Dragonspear and the Black Pits, but I kind of wish they'd kept their new stuff confined to those, or in seperate area maps for added content instead inserting it into the regular games in the familiar places. I liked Dorn (not so much the portrait, but he did fit a niche that was missing.) In BG2 the original game suffered from not having an Evil thief. I dont think we had any pure class or non kitted thiefs in BG2. Even Yoshimo was a bounty hunter. So I guess they added Hexxat, but she's pretty far from a pure class thief. They basically created a whole new thief kit just for her heheh.

But all in all, even with some enhancements I didnt dig, its still pretty solid and relatively cheap to pick up. A lot more conveniant than the old CDs or setting stuff up with TuTu/weidu. I still think the BG1 NPC project had a better slate of fan created content than BGEE provides. Its worth checking out I'd think if you like older games. I also agree that the 2d sprites of BG1/2 hold up a lot better than most early 3d rpg games hold up. Its a bit like the difference between watching 20th century traditional animation, stop motion, or analogue vfx vs early 21st century cgi. The former tend to hold up better and seem more timeless, whereas the latter tend to look immediately dated by the technology of the times.

Or again, to the initial analogy, like the difference between Return of the Jedi from 1983, vs Return of the Jedi Special Edition from 1997.