izigame.me

Having played both the original title (Baldur's Gate) and this sequel back to back over the course of the last month, it's a night and day difference. Whereas the original felt very much like a prototype and proof of concept, the second is a fully-fledged, high-quality RPG that offers an extremely enjoyable experience.
The first had the unfortunate development woes of the engine, tools, and even genre conventions being made at the same time as the game itself, leading to a disjointed and underwhelming experience bereft of a story or really any RPG interactions. It was fight after fight and the main exposition came at the very tail end of the game after sending you back and forth between nearly unrelated locations. This title, however, with all the tools and rules in place was where Bioware was truly free to create a rich game from top to bottom.
For starters, everything here feels solid and purposeful. Everything is built with an overall unified design, goal, or story in mind. Wandering around various wilderness maps devoid of content is all but gone, replaced instead with thematic and intentional dungeons, buildings, cities, and other locations. Also of notable presence is a story. From the opening seconds of the game, there's more story to it than the entire previous title and the characters that play in the story are actual characters written with personalities and motivations. There are clearly defined goals to the overall story and even the side quests and smaller stories found around the world are well crafted and feel impactful and meaningful. Dialogue is present and offers choice and exploration. The game also offers much more varied and interesting locations and story points. You'll visit some extreme reaches of the Forgotten Realms and some truly imaginative jaunts into a wealth of smaller but no less interesting places.
Even the combat, which I still loathe due to the shortcomings of real-time-with-pause combat in a complex RPG system, is much improved owing in large part due to the party's starting levels as a mid-level party and ascending up to high-level play. Unfortunately, while refined and bettered than the previous title, it still has the shortcomings of its combat system. A system designed around turn-based combat and limited encounters and resources suffers when the turns are blended together and replaced with arduous, constant pausing in order to affect meaningful tactics. Also related is the fact that the party starts mid-level and decently powerful and only goes up from there. By the two-thirds point of the game, encounters tend to throw a wealth of controlling effects or enemies that outright cannot be hit without the correct weapons as a means to elevate difficulty and counteract the party's power. This leads to increased frustration with this type of combat and due to the limited nature of protection against some of the game's favored ways to disrupt your party (be it time or uses) it turns what should be a relatively solid continuous combat experience into a slog. It's really just a bunch of inherent problems with the real-time-with-pause system and I'm happy more recent games, including the sequel to this one, have opted to return to turn-based modes.
This problem is only exacerbated with the included expansion, Throne Of Bhaal. Not only is it a wealth of these sort of frustrating encounters, but because it's the expansion and the highest-level content in the game it's almost exclusively this sort of disappointing and appalling design. Gone are the meaningful dialogues or the interesting character developments, wiped away with the notion of side quests or exploration in favor of difficult combat encounter after difficult combat encounter. I made it roughly halfway through the expansion before finding that what was on offer no longer respected my time or was any fun to engage with at all.
The bottom line is that even though the game has all the faults of its combat system and the expansion is almost completely made up of them, the base game is a fantastic RPG experience that set the bar high for years to come. This game is one of the reasons that for years the developer name Bioware was regarded with the highest praise and hearing they were working on a new project was an excitement in and of itself.
If you're looking at both Baldur's Gate titles, skip the first and immediately enjoy this one instead. If you're coming off the first title, be ready for a much, much better experience that holds up for the most part to this day.