The tricky part was remembering that the saved games represented the world only, and the characters remained distinct. However, a bonus to that was that you could give the various stat-increasing Tomes and Manuals in BG1 to a character, export them, then bring them back in and drop the item indefinitely (you did not even need to save the game, just hit "C" and keep going through the character arbitration screen to swap them in and out of games.) In fact, you could do that with any and all items, which is how I wound up with a party full of guys wielding Drizzts scimitars (even if I could not dualwield until BG2.)

Enhanced sounds cool; hopefully it will be available reasonably soon for download on one of the sites that does that. I re-bought BGI and II that way not long ago and still need to re-finish the second, but heartily endorse creating whole parties. The AI is adept at screwing up perfectly good NPCs, both in stat allocation and proficiencies. I favor a F/M, F/T, T, R and Paladin. The last two give access to some decent priest spells at high levels, and healing potions are common enough I do not need much more. F/M/Ts advance so slowly they are not really worth it until near the end of ToB, and straight class thieves come in handy for finding and removing traps, especially at the start; trying to do that with JUST a F/T results in lots of damage because their thief skills just cannot pace the games difficulty level.

Also: If you use multi-player for no other reason, it is worth it to equip everyone with boots of speed. Particularly when you get kits in BGII (or even BGI if modded,) a F/T, T and R (or rather, Stalker,) makes the rest of the party superfluous once they have decent Hide in Shadows and Move Silently skills. You can just hide, waltz up to enemies and backstab three of them to death, then run out of sight, hide and do it all again.

Anyway, never done a pure evil party, no, but creating ones own party is always a good idea because most NPCs are garbage, and the computer always screws them up royally. I always loved Coran both for his stats and for what he is, but he is unavailable until the Cloakwood opens up in Chapter 3, and even going straight there ASAP his proficiencies will be trashed by the time I reach him. On the other hand, I can create my own party and spec them however I like, even start some out as human fighters and dual class them at 9th or 10th level when they are fully specced and no longer getting new HD (if you REALLY want to minmax them, hold out for 13th level so you get the extra 1/2 attack per round, but that usually requires modding the game so there is no XP cap.)

I do not know how you feel about modding in general (believe it or not, I try to keep at a minimum both because I do not know what I am doing and because I do not want to take the challenge out of it) or how possible it will be for Enhanced (modding seems to have inspired much of enhance, but Wes Weimer is too busy teaching CS now to do another series of Weidu mods) but can tell you it really rejuvenated the games for me. Durlags was not nearly so fun the second time as the first though; even a decade later, it is difficult to unlearn things. Well, that was a lot longer than intended; here is hoping BG Enhanced is awesome, and happy gaming.