When I last left BG2 behind, I had killed a lich with a disrupting weapon that has a chance to kill undead, before the conversation even ended. He was standing on a table when I unfairly murdered him, and thus his loot was inaccessible. I thought that was BS2 and gave up, even after we found out that his loot drop was just cash. I missed many things from the first game, which I think weighed on me a bit heavily and reduced my enjoyment to the point where I felt like moving on to other things. But after many years' hiatus I came back, and I'm surprised how mixed up my memories were at times. It seems BG and BG2 occupied similar spots in my brain, and some of the data accidentally got put in the wrong places.
 
I played the first Baldur's Gate primarily on a friend's computer, and so that time tended to be stolen time when no one else was around. More than anything else I loved wandering the wilderness and discovering side quests just by bumping into them. There were few discrete questgiving moments from a central location; it was all about exploring, and I loved that. I still do, and I wish more games had tried it. When I took the game up again some years ago to complete it, after having played some Baldur's Gate 2 in the meantime, I was surprised how relatively little the party feels alive in the first game. I think in part I remember Baldur's Gate 2's level of interaction, with spontaneous conversations (sometimes at inconvenient times) that made them seem more like actual characters and less like extensions of the player character. So, while the exploration elements made the environment feel rich and fun to explore, the sequel improved upon the original by making the characters a bit richer if you wanted to delve into that. 
 
The natural side-quest exploration is something I miss, though. Now that I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2 with the intent to finish it, I remember why I missed the old system so much. Simple movement from one end of the major city to the other means being accosted by random people who dump a quest or encounter in my lap while I'm trying to finish something else. At one point I had to lug two bodies around, one dead and one alive, as the encounters kept piling up. It felt very front-loaded to me, and I now remember how hard I tried to finish off all the side-quests I could the first time I played, thinking that they would keep coming in subsequent chapters.
 
As it turns out, part of my initial exhaustion with BG2 was that the pileup of side quests in the beginning was pretty much the sum total of side quests in the game, and that all the rest, as far as I knew, was the main storyline. No even sprinkling, as far as I could see, but a huge blob at the front that's overwhelming, followed by silence.
 
But I learned too that BG2 isn't nearly as stable as the first game. This playthrough has already yielded a bug that forced me to go back to an earlier save, and there are weird scripting errors that caused problems that I'm dreading running into again. I think that's in part a virtue of it being a more complicated game, with a lot more interplay *cough* between different elements than before, with some pretty snazzy and strange items and character abilities that no doubt contribute to the increased errors. And man, do I love containers. All games should have containers. All of them.

 
My strategy this time through is to not hoard things. It worked pretty well during my brief attempt to play Morrowind as a stalwart Orc, so I thought I'd try it here, reducing my dependency on a full magic user, while selling many of the things I've found. My main character is an archer, so naturally that's where the ammo belt goes, Minsc has a scrollbook full of quest papers and protection scrolls, Jaheira has the potion pouch, Yoshimo has two gem bags, one for jewelry and one for gemstones, Tiefling Bard Boy (the first bard character ever that I've actually managed to tolerate) holds on to the mage scrolls, though I wonder if I'm going to dump him at some point for someone a bit more good at something specific. 
 
I've also been trying to use the strong stealth elements in my party to beat places I probably am too weak to tackle otherwise. I raided a beholder complex only killing the main antagonist and then sneaking out of there, killing next to none of the human stragglers in the bargain. And a plane with enthralled creatures seemingly forced me to fight with the human beings trapped there, but I found a way past all of the mind-controlled people and destroyed the thing controlling them, so I didn't have to kill any innocents (though many died in the upheval afterward). Was hard, but I felt damned accomplished after escaping. 
 
So far just one game-killing bug. Hopefully I won't run into any more, but I'm still wary.

When I last left BG2 behind, I had killed a lich with a disrupting weapon that has a chance to kill undead, before the conversation even ended. He was standing on a table when I unfairly murdered him, and thus his loot was inaccessible. I thought that was BS2 and gave up, even after we found out that his loot drop was just cash. I missed many things from the first game, which I think weighed on me a bit heavily and reduced my enjoyment to the point where I felt like moving on to other things. But after many years' hiatus I came back, and I'm surprised how mixed up my memories were at times. It seems BG and BG2 occupied similar spots in my brain, and some of the data accidentally got put in the wrong places.
 
I played the first Baldur's Gate primarily on a friend's computer, and so that time tended to be stolen time when no one else was around. More than anything else I loved wandering the wilderness and discovering side quests just by bumping into them. There were few discrete questgiving moments from a central location; it was all about exploring, and I loved that. I still do, and I wish more games had tried it. When I took the game up again some years ago to complete it, after having played some Baldur's Gate 2 in the meantime, I was surprised how relatively little the party feels alive in the first game. I think in part I remember Baldur's Gate 2's level of interaction, with spontaneous conversations (sometimes at inconvenient times) that made them seem more like actual characters and less like extensions of the player character. So, while the exploration elements made the environment feel rich and fun to explore, the sequel improved upon the original by making the characters a bit richer if you wanted to delve into that. 
 
The natural side-quest exploration is something I miss, though. Now that I'm playing Baldur's Gate 2 with the intent to finish it, I remember why I missed the old system so much. Simple movement from one end of the major city to the other means being accosted by random people who dump a quest or encounter in my lap while I'm trying to finish something else. At one point I had to lug two bodies around, one dead and one alive, as the encounters kept piling up. It felt very front-loaded to me, and I now remember how hard I tried to finish off all the side-quests I could the first time I played, thinking that they would keep coming in subsequent chapters.
 
As it turns out, part of my initial exhaustion with BG2 was that the pileup of side quests in the beginning was pretty much the sum total of side quests in the game, and that all the rest, as far as I knew, was the main storyline. No even sprinkling, as far as I could see, but a huge blob at the front that's overwhelming, followed by silence.
 
But I learned too that BG2 isn't nearly as stable as the first game. This playthrough has already yielded a bug that forced me to go back to an earlier save, and there are weird scripting errors that caused problems that I'm dreading running into again. I think that's in part a virtue of it being a more complicated game, with a lot more interplay *cough* between different elements than before, with some pretty snazzy and strange items and character abilities that no doubt contribute to the increased errors. And man, do I love containers. All games should have containers. All of them.

 
My strategy this time through is to not hoard things. It worked pretty well during my brief attempt to play Morrowind as a stalwart Orc, so I thought I'd try it here, reducing my dependency on a full magic user, while selling many of the things I've found. My main character is an archer, so naturally that's where the ammo belt goes, Minsc has a scrollbook full of quest papers and protection scrolls, Jaheira has the potion pouch, Yoshimo has two gem bags, one for jewelry and one for gemstones, Tiefling Bard Boy (the first bard character ever that I've actually managed to tolerate) holds on to the mage scrolls, though I wonder if I'm going to dump him at some point for someone a bit more good at something specific. 
 
I've also been trying to use the strong stealth elements in my party to beat places I probably am too weak to tackle otherwise. I raided a beholder complex only killing the main antagonist and then sneaking out of there, killing next to none of the human stragglers in the bargain. And a plane with enthralled creatures seemingly forced me to fight with the human beings trapped there, but I found a way past all of the mind-controlled people and destroyed the thing controlling them, so I didn't have to kill any innocents (though many died in the upheval afterward). Was hard, but I felt damned accomplished after escaping. 
 
So far just one game-killing bug. Hopefully I won't run into any more, but I'm still wary.

There's a mod which translates BG1 into BG2's engine, which sounds cool. I haven't tried it myself though. Mods generally might do much to improve the experience of either game, but you may prefer to complete them vanilla first, as they might possibly interpolate things that detract from the experience.

" There's a mod which translates BG1 into BG2's engine, which sounds cool. I haven't tried it myself though. Mods generally might do much to improve the experience of either game, but you may prefer to complete them vanilla first, as they might possibly interpolate things that detract from the experience. "