Still an enjoyable game and a great first step into the better games that made use of the engine that came after it, and the changes in the Enhanced Version tend to be for the better.

Baldur's Gate often reads like there are plot elements, lines, and entire character personalities pulled right from a developer's D&D session. Reference heavy, characters with little dialogue other than enough to give a personality like crazy evil guy, butt kicking force for goodness, revenge focused guy with dead wife, lawful stupid paladin, etc. A single writing style or characterization for the protagonist is pretty much nonexistent as what kind of things you say are just all over the place. Usually giving a positive or negative (or good/evil) style response or with questions or a more neutral sounding affirmative but it's a mixture of serious, funny, ridiculous, pop culture references with near everything you say. A very large amount of NPC encounters or lines are references to Monty Python, X-Men, Judge Dredd, The Simpsons, the 80s Newhart show where the characters act as a reference to characters from the show and tell you you're from the wrong generation if you say you don't know who they are instead of asking for an autograph, plays, a dwarf says slightly altered lines from the song Sixteen Tons, the miners you find will cough and say they think they are coughing up blood but if this game released after Zoolander I have no doubt that would have been changed to a weaker sounding cough with the line changed to "I think I got the black lung Pop." It can certainly be entertaining at times but not as memorable narrative wise or as character driven as many stronger games in the genre.

There are some nice things about the old 2nd edition D&D ruleset and some of the mechanics in Baldur's Gate 1. The morale system where your enemies and allies (different NPC break at different levels) can break and have a panic effect applied is a nice way to add some realism to encounters, more than the typical everyone just is ok fighting to death all the time you get with basically every other game and your party leader's charisma or a bard playing music can raise that morale level. Weapons have speed values that make them attack slower or faster in each combat round, something gone in new editions and Pathfinder, that makes it so a lot of weapons just don't make any sense to use because they just do less damage or have less additional features (damage types/armor break/trip/disarm/etc). Hitting faster in the round can mean a lot if you end up being able to apply status effects, break an enemy's concentration on a spell, or outright kill them before they get to attack. I like that there are enemies that just naturally resist certain types of damage (slash/blunt/pierce) that is basically gone from new D&D and that even the armor or magic equipment you get might protect better or worse against certain types of physical damage. Punching people can knock them out which allows you to either steal things from the area without them seeing and losing reputation for killing them, charm person spells can also allow this or can change an NPC's dialogue and give you new information about them. Your charisma bonus (or penalty) is added to your reputation which can alter some conversations, rewards, and for some characters having a high or low enough reputation might make certain quests available or get you attacked by people that might have asked for your assistance. On the negative side of the old rules are the very low chance to hit low level characters frequently have, wanting a low armor value (preferable in the negatives) is odd, THAC0 is a more complicated system to calculate hit values since you want it to be lower and classes decrease it at different rates but magic items say they add to it even though they make it easier to hit, and everything about how stats work is completely different from how it is done from third edition on (like your constitution being over 16 for more health won't matter unless you are a warrior class and the bonus constitution health only applies up until a certain level or that the game says wisdom can resist spell effects but never actually added this to the game).

When it comes to changes made in the EE addition, the four new recruitable NPC characters (with one being a more of a secret find as he is the main antagonist of the Black Pits arena style add on) are all decent enough additions. They each give you a class type different from what you get in the main game for recruitable characters, though the monk character could probably have benefitted from better stats or unique items with how weak the class tends to be (especially in the low level environments of BG1). Either mistakes or problems from lack of models in the original game are often fixed here or changed such as characters casting spells they shouldn't be able to, characters with the wrong alignment, a massive amount of character that had the wrong model/gender or alignment (be it a issue of time, mistake, or just not having the model until later games) such as a quest where an ogre mage teleports to hell which has now been corrected by giving him a devil model, unique items for certain characters just not giving them the bonuses they are supposed to (taking a character like Alora from poor to the best thief in the game thanks to her rabbit foot item). A very positive change is in adding the new spells from Baldur's Gate 2 into this game, giving spellcasters more options and making the druid class more useable. They brought in the feature from later games with this engine where you can hold tab to highlight interactable objects in the environment, as well as adding a button to the UI that just toggles highlights on and off. Some new weapons and equipment pieces have also been added and some missing or nonfunctioning content or conversations have been added (most of these had to formerly be added with the Unfinished Business mod, which is still useable and still adds other content). Having potions and ranged ammunition stack at much higher number improves inventory management, as does adding in the Baldur's Gate 2 items that allowed you to store gems/jewelry, scrolls, and potions. An instant quick save and load and having the game in a digital format that doesn't need to swapping between six CDs is also a nice bonus.

Some of the class kit options added to the game that were from Baldur's Gate 2 give you almost no positive bonuses at low levels and don't add anything of value to the game, unless you plan to import the character you played through Baldur's Gate 1 into Baldur's Gate 2. Though they are still welcome additions, and being able to easily bring your kit in from the previous game was likely the main point. Pathfinding issues are still frequent, I don't know if it is new to this version but I don't recall having frequent problems where characters would actually walk inside of each other and get stuck. Limited character interaction, many don't have a quest or anything unique about their character or equipment, this makes it so a lot of them aren't really interesting or memorable unless you add mods into the game. The text box isn't handled that well, all the text being far too small by default (but that can be changed in options) and scrolling doesn't work well. With the enhanced edition, there was probably no real reason why certain weapons end up with much better items than others (two handed swords, long swords, daggers, and short swords tend to have better endgame equipment or frequent drops of magical versions compared to most other weapons) and it would have been nice if there were some store options or more extra equipment added especially considering they added Baldur's Gate 2 weapon proficiencies to each class. There are still some terrible location designs where entrances to buildings are basically hidden or you have to walk on a path that you have no reason to even believe is walkable to reveal a sightline to a companion NPC. What hurts the gameplay the most is that it is obsessed with giving enemies natural abilities or spells that hold/stun characters that unless you just stock up on potions or spell types that can bypass it you either won't have a good answer for dealing with or you just take away the only thing that makes them threatening. The other thing it does constantly is gives almost every enemy mage lightning bolt. Fireball doesn't make much sense for enemies since they would likely be hitting everyone with it themselves, their allies, all of your characters, etc so that's likely why there is so much lightning bolt. But the confined way a lot of places are designed can easily mean that a lightning bolt will bounce around and might hit one character three times, hit the caster, and hit their allies anyway. It pretty much turns into a random luck based fireball where I've had one kill my entire party from random wall deflections and I've had it it bounce right back to the caster to kill them and then proceed to kill every other enemy in the group. Some of the old cutscenes when you first go to a new area are missing, these added a bit of humor or personality to the location. I believe you can add them back with a mod. As far as I hear they paid someone to make new ones and after they did a terrible job they just didn't use most of them or used but later removed them after complaints.

I played with the Unfinished Business mod, an NPC banter and quest mod, and two mods that added a lot of interjections and conversations with the NPCs Xan, Imoen, and Coran. If I have a screenshot where a companion NPC is talking it is very likely not from the base game.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1643794331864801280

Capcom could sell me on a whole ass Capconsole if they keep dropping 2 GOTY contenders a year. No point writing up a novel for a game this simple and this good. Is there 60 dollars of content at launch? Absolutely. So don't miss out on that new game scene and get it ASAP. I know its still honeymoon phase and all, but I've already sampled the whole platter and know it's everything I ever wanted as a casual player. The box art is fucking stupid though.

5 stars for knowing what it needs to be and doing that thing perfectly.