Warning — Developer does not support this app, which crashes on El Capitan

Update: The App Store application is now four versions behind (the latest version is 2.3; this is 1.3, which was released almost a year and a half ago) and crashes consistently on El Capitan. The developers have stated publicly that they are in no hurry to realease an update here (they’ve complained about teh review process, and apparently have messed up submissions); they claim that at some unspecified date they will eventually do so with some unspecified version. The last time this happened the wait was fifteen months for a functional version of the game to appear on the App Store, during which time anyone who had purchased it elsewhere could enjoy the latest versions. (For reference: version 2.0, a very major update with content changes and crash fixes, was released April 1, 2016; they subsequently released 2.1, 2,.2, and most recently 2.3.)

If you are running El Capitan, this version will crash; you can work around (turning off the sound is said to help; also beware tooltips). 2.3 is said to fix that and is available if you purchase it directly from the developer, but if you purchase it here you are out of luck unless they eventually bother to submit an update.

In short, if you must have this game, do not buy it on the App Store.

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Original review: Baldur’s Gate II is a wonderful game. BGII "Enhanced" edition is, um… mostly the same wonderful game, modified a bit to run on various platforms and with some added content that is generally viewed by those new to the game as interesting and by those who know it from way back as predominantly fanfic-level trash. But hey, it works on a Mac, which is more than can be said for the original, unless you go through ridiculous hoops and are highly tolerant of effort and compromise; take it from someone who has done this that you would rather not, particularly if you intend to try to install mods.

Or rather, there is a version that I’m told works on a Mac. This isn’t it.

The current version on the Apple store, as of December 17, 2014, is 1.2.0. That version was released about a year and a half ago and is a buggy, often-unplayable mess. Beamdog issued a patch in late 2013, but that patch never made it to the Apple Store version. As to why, allow me to quote an admin on Beamdog’s forum:

"It sounds like the 1.2.2030 patch wasnt ever uploaded to the Mac App Store; well make sure the 1.3 patch gets there, along with all of the other platforms."

That post was made on March 9, 2014, in response to Mac users’ clamoring for a patch that had been available for non-Apple Store purchases for four months. And that’s all she or anyone else had to say on the matter; they apparently never bothered to submit the bug fixes to Apple, so users have been stuck with an acknowledgedly-buggy version for over a year.

Yesterday (12/16/14), version 1.3 was finally released; it is said to be replete with bug fixes and may finally make the game playable. But the only word from Beamdog as to when it will show up here (or whether they even bothered submitting the patch to Apple this time around) is a table entry that reads: "Available on Apple Store — No".

So, potential purchasers, that’s what you get if you click "buy": a version that’s going on a year and a half old, when multiple patches have been written in the interim, from people who acknowledged that the reason for the omission is that they didn’t bother submitting to Apple and who haven’t said another word on the matter for over nine months. This is an unsupported game that is basically beta quality, even though the company has recently released Mac updates.

Should you consider buying it if you can find a way to make it work? That’s another matter. If you want to run BGII on a Mac, the EE is probably the way to do it, unfortunately. (You can try running it on a virtualized Windows installation, but I’ve done that several times and found it works poorly at best. Or you can install the original, along with all the tweaks necessary to make it work; I’ve been through this and have never been happy with the result but if you’re tech-savvy and patient it can be made to work.) The new content is mostly poor and installing mods on a Mac is still kludgy as heck even when you get everything running (and mods are a central part of the experience for many BGII players), but if it works at all it may be worth it. You decide whether that’s worth getting involved with those responsible for what I’ve described here.

atakdog about Baldur's Gate II, v1.3