BG1NPC VS A7-DlcMerger

Baldur's Gate 2 (You kinda need to play 1 to understand 2, and 1 has mods that add in romances that are then expanded into the second game. The second game does have romances but I'm not a fan of them. Especially the base game, non-Enhanced Version romances. However that site I linked and several others have romance NPC you can download that add dozens of hours to your playthrough.)(I have hundreds of hours in these games just from the mods alone.)

Oh, sorry, I meant the BG1NPC mod, which adds banters, quests, interjections, and romances for all of the original NPCs. I will say that I don't agree with the writers' interpretation of every character, but on the whole it adds a lot of life to BG1, bringing the level of character chatter up to BG2's, so I haven't played without it in a long time.

BG1NPC: banters, romances, and interjections.

If you're expecting the kind of party banter and interjections you got from your listed games, I will suggest the BG1 NPC Project. https://www.gibberlings3.net/mods/npcs/bg1npc/ Otherwise a lot of party members will join and then pretty much never speak up again.

BG1NPC - expands BG1 characters, adding banters, quests, and optional romances.

If the quiet party members are a factor for you, then I suggest https://www.gibberlings3.net/mods/npcs/bg1npc/ which adds a lot of dialogue and romance and quests to the existing characters and a lot of people won't play without it. Some people think your first playthrough should remain pure and vanilla without mods, but I feel that if you're coming from more modern games, there's nothing wrong with modding them to be what you want.

Yeah, that's definitely a deal breaker, but thankfully, you can easily mod their spawn locations. The Gibberlings3's Tweaks Anthology and BG1 NPC Project have a component to move those NPCs to more convenient locations. Unmodded, you can still spawn them with the CreateCreature cheat.

For BGEE, I would consider the BG1 NPC project a must-have.

I love the two original Baldur's Gate games, but there was almost no character development in the first one. They didn't really introduce romances, party banter, and important personal quests til BGII. The plus side is the Baldur's Gate modding community is huge and wrote all those things into BG1. https://www.gibberlings3.net/mods/npcs/bg1npc/

BG1NPC project adds a bunch of quests for existing NPCs, if you haven't played it.

Firstly You're gonna need to download DlcMerger

For future reference, this tool is a bit more up to date and does the same thing.

Download all the mods you want (in this case, the DLC Merger, EET, BG1 Unfinished Business, BG2 Unfinished Business, the Tweaks Anthology). I've provided links for each of them. 1. If there are multiple files, pick the .zip that matches your computer OS (most likely win64-bit). Extract any downloaded zip files.

DLC merger - necessary if you own the Dragonspear DLC, otherwise ignore this.

When you're modding BG1, if you own the Dragonspear DLC, you need to install DLC merger first.

download and install DLC Merger.

Two recommendations: 1. https://github.com/Argent77/A7-DlcMerger this will merge in the DLC to one game so that mods will actually work, if you only have SoD as the installed DLC option 1 is what you want 2. Typically when you install mods you'll want to make a copy of your install outside of steam so that updates won't brick things. Can just ctrl + c -> ctrl + v to another directory

Ok, so I found this DLC mod that must be added to games with SoD from GOG (I have that one): https://github.com/Argent77/A7-DlcMerger/releases/tag/v1.3

DLC Merger https://github.com/Argent77/A7-DlcMerger/releases You'll need to install this first if you plan on using EET. See more instructions below.

If you have SoD (and don't have the game directly from Beamdog), you need to install DLCMerger from https://github.com/Argent77/A7-DlcMerger/releases/tag/v1.3 before the others.