CerndFriendship VS BG1NPC

Minsc, Yoshimo, Valygar, Cernd, Imoen, Korgan, Mazzy, Viconia. Pair these with the Banter pack and IEP for even more chatter.

Minsc (note: lets you talk to Boo), Yoshimo, Valygar, Cernd, Imoen, Korgan (it's basically a pub crawl, it's great), Mazzy, Viconia, and Sarevok.

Friendship mods: Cernd, Valygar, Minsc, Imoen, Yoshimo, Korgan, Viconia, Haer’Dalis, and Mazzy. There’s one I haven’t linked here for spoiler reasons. Only click this if you don’t mind having a semi-hidden NPC spoiled: Sarevok friendship Also recommended are BG1 Neera Expansion (for BG1), Wilson Chronicles, and Wings, an Aerie friendship/banter mod.

Extended banter project - NPCs talk with each other more Banter pack - same thing. Some people find the level of chatter excessive, but if you're a completionist, it's easy to run out of dialogue Ascension - the original version was actually written by David Gaider. It's been totally recoded. I don't recommend installing the first component (rewritten chapter 10) because the fight is super tough, but the other stuff is good - longer epilogues, improved character interaction, etc. There are also a bunch of friendship mods that offer expanded non-romantic content. All quite well-written. I've played and liked: Valygar, Minsc, Imoen, Yoshimo, Viconia, Mazzy, Haer'Dalis, and Cernd.

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.