Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition

[Johnny Blade]

There was some huge mod released not long ago that transplanted the IWD campaign into I think NWN2. Or it might have been NWN1, I don't know.

I didn't think that Icewind Dale 2 was any worse than the first, and it uses the 3.0 ruleset. They're both fairly straightforward hack-and-slash dungeon crawls.

I found IWD2 completely broke down around halfway through, gameplay- and mechanics-wise. Most battles just started to revolve around grinding down hordes of the same enemy type, and for some reason I can't remember the program stops giving you XP unless you trick it into doing so.



As for control vs. blasting magic, I think that depends on what your party looks like. You'll always want some control, but if you're running around with three wizards (or Edwin and a sorcerer, which is almost like having three wizards) you can AoE-spam things to death pretty conveniently. If you just have one arcane caster, you'll probably have too many slots devoted to utility like Dispel, Breach and Improved Haste to throw around many Fireballs, Cloudkills or Death Spells.
Basically, if you go for blasting, you want a lot of it.
But I agree that early on, damage-scaling means it's better to just disable enemies with Sleep or Web or whatever and shoot them full of arrows.


EDIT:

So.

I've finally installed Baldur's Gate I and II on my laptop, and I am going to go through the game for the first time. Tips, mods you recommend, anything?

Might be too late, but I would have recommended going straight for Tutu or BGT (both are engine ports) so you don't have to experience BG1's awkward resolution and interface, painfully slow walking speed, and sometimes kinda clunky sprites.
Apart from that, the only things I'd say you might want to look into would be some minor rules fixes/adjustments, but I think just going in mod-free would be my recommendation as well, apart from the engine port.