Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Review (Dark_Swordmaster)
To be honest, the fact that this is not recommended is due to Steam's lack of a middle ground. This is a fine game but in the nearly 25 years since its release and when I played it to completion it has been eclipsed in the genre in almost every way and still sits at a $20 price point when not on sale, far too much for what amounts to a genre prototype.
Taken at face value, Baldur's Gate is perfectly fine. It's an isometric CRPG adapting the rules of AD&D which allows for an automated dungeon crawl experience. I remember playing it as a kid and it was great then, but that's because it was one of the genre progenitors. Looking at it through the lens of over 20 years of genre evolution has shown how much subsequent titles have raised the bar, despite owing a lot to this one for laying a lot of the groundwork.
For the higher-level RPG aspects such as party members, story, quests, etc., the game is incredibly shallow and unsatisfying. Nearly all quests are returning an item an NPC lost. Party members have very basic introductions, simple quests, and little beyond their introduction and quest dialog, almost never talking beyond their confirmation or selection voice barks. Almost every NPC around the world has little or nothing to say with barely any dialog trees to explore, and an overwhelming majority of those that talk to you have 2 or 3 options that all lead to a fight. The world is devoid of interesting locations or things and even the dungeons are fairly bland.
For the vast majority of the game, however, the combat is what you'll be engaging with, and that's at least the highest point of the game. Throughout the entirety of the genre, I feel that real-time-with-pause is incredibly poor and turn-based combat is irrefutably better. Unfortunately very few of these games offer a choice between them and so here you're stuck with the RTWP option. There's not a lot to it, you click on the enemies and then your characters go to attack them, do so, kill them, and you repeat it for 40 hours. Again, as an early release in the isometric CRPG genre, there's a lot missing that has become standard. Melee characters have little in the way of skills and abilities, instead relying on potions/scrolls to do things for them and then proceeding to swing repeatedly at whatever's in front of them. Even thieves and rangers and anything else you use as ranged is very similarly restricted. Playing as a magic user as the main character, at low levels there are so few spells to use that there are few options for even a caster. It's not bad, but it's not good.
Finally, for the base content, there's the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion content. It's geared towards absolutely high-level parties towards the end game and even then it's almost overtuned. Playing with a high-level thief with dozens of points in trap detection and disarming about half the traps in this content were insurmountable. The enemies and encounters were similarly difficult and occasionally reliant on special damage that was incredibly uncommon to find. Quite honestly if it were possible to remove this content from the game I would have done so. As it is, it's thankfully easy to avoid completely.
Beyond that, the Enhanced Edition has plenty of technical improvements or game updates, some are fantastic, some are horrible. Obviously, the fact that it simply runs on a modern system is a massive positive. It also supports 21:9 resolutions out of the box and everything overall looks sharper. Fixing 20-year-old bugs is also an obvious unquestionable win. The less positive options are the additions. There are new NPC's and their related locations that don't mesh with the game well (at all really), aren't enjoyable in their writing or personality, but thankfully can be avoided almost entirely. The EE also has included some "advanced AI" scripts for party members which I cannot recommend turning off fast enough. All of these scripts cause the AI to attack on sight, often meaning encounters cannot be taken at your pace or by your planning. They also use offensive spells and abilities even on enemies they're not needed for and use defensive spells even outside of combat and far away from an encounter, wasting them for no benefit. There's also the new Black Pits combat-centric content but with my aversion to this genre's (and in particular this game's) real-time-with-pause combat, I cannot recommend it in any capacity.
Overall the original Baldur's Gate is an okay game, but it is nearly impossible to recommend after so many years of advancement in the genre. If you do feel the need to play this title make sure to grab it at a deep discount. Even under the idea of "completionist" or a prelude to the sequel, a one-paragraph summation of this game is all you need before you start Baldur's Gate II: Shadows Of Amn. Having played about three hours of the sequel, even that short introduction makes that title infinitely easier to recommend due to how much further along all aspects of the game have evolved in that short time span.