Looking for a package deal on Baldur's Gate games + others

[Miloch]

I did a quick eBay search, turned up two UK sellers offering the FR deluxe pack (here and here) - both will ship to Canada.

some people will sell you versions that may not necessarily be optimal for your region.

But there are different versions of the games themselves (UK vs. US/Canada vs. International). At least that much is clear as far as some of the patches. Though no one's been able to tell me exactly what those differences are, apart from possibly something related to "video formats."

 

Atari may have prepatched the game somehow avoiding regional issues in the process (a bit like BG1 The Original Saga I suppose) but good luck getting any information out of them or their website, which seems to have plenty of ads about the latest anime/Dragon Ball Z game of your choice but none on this compilation. And for their other patches, they seem to just repeat the game description itself, having no actual data about the patch .

 

I did hear the German version of NWN doesn't allow "gore" which I find rather ironically amusing (see Rob Bartel's post about halfway down). Or it makes it the blood green instead of red, heh. Also creatures of "child" type may be invulnerable between localisations. Not sure if things like that apply to UK vs. NA versions, but who knows. Since the dialogue itself isn't different amongst English game versions (it's all supposedly in US English) it could well be any differences relate to details of this nature.

 

Having said all that, since there's only one official NA distributor of this compilation and the packaging appears identical to the version prevalent in the UK, it could well be the same thing that GoGamer just got the rights to distribute in the US. Meaning you're still getting a UK/European version of the game, as far as any cut content, if that applies here.

[Miloch]

why in the world would a distributor inhibit potential violence for a budget re-release (again, if they're even allowed to)?

Who was suggesting that? I was saying the games already had localisations before this compilation (fact, not speculation - I doubt Germany is the only special case). So what's of question is which version of the games this includes. And I was saying it seems to be the UK versions, unless the games are patched to the "latest" releases that aren't regionally specific - as BG1 The Original Saga seems to be. It has the latest patch, but doesn't specify whether that's US or UK (if there's a real difference, which is an obvious unknown at this point).

(if there are any meaningful differences between the versions, don't you think they would have come to light through end-user installation of mods?).

Not necessarily, unless the mods touch those aspects specifically. But why would a mod, unless its goal was to address any differences? You'd have to know what they were first, and I know of no one who has both the US and UK versions to make a comparison. And I know of no mods at all that tamper with the cinematics or even "gore" settings in any significant way. Even if a mod did, it might have the same effect on both versions - an "edited" version might have the same resources present - they're just suppressed in some way.

It definitely looks identical to the American release. Some eBay sellers specialize in more-or-less worldwide shipping for items which would normally only be available in the US.

In yet another case of carriage-before-horse, this is a product hitherto available only in Europe from what I've been following, which now has a (single) distributor in the US. So the US "release" looks identical to the UK release, not the other way around.

 

All this is theoretical. I'm almost tempted to spring for this release, though I'm not keen on slapping down US$50+ to satisfy my idle curiosity. But I don't own either IWD or NWN or their expansions yet, so maybe this would save me money just on those. I might wait til it comes down a bit or becomes more widely available through other vendors. As I said earlier, I've also heard several reports of installation and execution issues with this compilation, so I'm also a bit leery of that.

[Gorilym]

In yet another case of carriage-before-horse, this is a product hitherto available only in Europe from what I've been following, which now has a (single) distributor in the US. So the US "release" looks identical to the UK release, not the other way around.

The only presumably official (the eBay sellers are almost certainly not official distributors) UK distributor I've seen is Play.com, and the package they're selling has a 16+ rating (as well as a different overall design) as opposed to a 12+ rating on the GoGamer and eBay images. I.e. the U.K. release does NOT look identical to the U.S. one, but the ones currently being sold on eBay do.