I just made it into the city of BG last night so I think I'm 90% done with the game looking at the map. Here's a couple observations I thought I'd share.
* The tips at the bottom of the screen are awesome and really helped me out. One of the items I liked in particular was the one about starting a multiplayer game so you can have more of your own rolled characters in the group. I created a paladin inquisitor, a ranger archer, a thief swashbuckler, a sorcerer, and a cleric. I'm thinking after getting to level 10 with my swashbuckler I might dual him in SOA to a mage (I used to play AD&D so I planned ahead and put 17 into int).
* Being able to use the broader character creation choices of BGII is awesome! I'm loving every one of my characters (with exception to my cleric which is mostly just used for healing), and I'm especially impressed with the performance of my archer. He almost always hits for big damage and is especially nasty against mages and other archers.
* The game does crash to desktop once in a while. I'm pretty sure that has to do with the BGII game engine. One time it even corrupted my quicksave and set me back about 3-4 hours of play.
* As for playing BG1 content I think it's awesome overall but there are a couple things I hoped would be in it but weren't. First, I felt the game disadvantaged many character classes by offering very few options to avoid combat encounters through use of high ability scores (e.g.1 if your wisdom was over 16 you could have a chance for a message to pop up saying it looks like the path ahead appears to be a risky place for an ambush. e.g.2 if your dexterity is over 16 you get an option to quickly put a blade to the opponent leader's throat before he could swing at you and thus force his surrender). I also wish there were more post-creation character development choices like offering subquests to join various factions or guilds that would have a lasting impact on many NPC encounters down the road (it would've even have been nice if more NPC's would even recognise if you had a character of a certain class or who worshiped a particular god in your party and would be influenced by that). I longed for more npc dialog choices as well because most of the time I only had two options: to do the quest or leave (there were many instances where I wished the dialog options I picked could influence how that NPC felt about me). There was never anything that affected alignment towards good vs evil or order vs chaos (choices could only affect reputation and there were probably less than 30 opportunities in the entire game that could even effect that). Too many maps used kobolds, gibberlings, and gnolls and these encounters got rather old. There isn't much dungeon crawling and I would have loved to see a lot more. Thief skills could have been used a lot better by having stealth missions required for some sidequests and allowing to to have at least a small chance of robbing items from merchants. Inventory is very restricted and I felt it would've been great if I could've purchased a pack mule. Even without these things this is a great game and it's still one of the best D&D computer games I've ever played.