In BG1 it takes a while until you get magic weapons to your whole party. Finding the few +2 weapons is already somewhat of an achievement, particularly if you don't have too much prior meta knowledge.
Disagree, unless we call Fine weapons magical. If we don't, it took me about the same time to outfit the entire team as it did in my first BG playthroughs.[/QUOTE]
Let's see...
You can get a dagger +1 in Candlekeep, and another one in Beregost (paying for it). There are only 2 daggers +2 in the game, and both appear inside Baldur's Gate, which is late into the game.
There are a couple of extra daggers +1 around, if you go all the way to Ulcaster or enter the Ankheg caves, which you cannot really do at low level in your first playthrough unless you have asperger's.
There are only 2 battle axes +1, you have to purchase them, one from Beregost and another one in Baldur's Gate, where the +2 one is too. So... late game stuff. The flying one is after returning to Candlekeep.
There's a single hallberd +1 in some random cave in the ass of the world.
There are 4 flails +1, but the only one kind of accessible early is the one carried by one of the fishermen near the entrance of Baldur's Gate.
You can purchase a Mace +1 in Beregost or wait until you reach Baldur's Gate to loot one.
To grab a Morning Star +1 you have to go towards Gullykin, which you have no real reason to do by plot, and will need to either loot it from a group of adventurers in the area north of Gullykin, or from one of the group in the south of the Gullykin map, which can be a tricky encounter.
You cannot get a spear +1 before the third level of the Cloakwood Mines. No +2 spears in the game.
You can purchase a quarterstaff +1 at Beregost or get it from Silke's corpse. +2 quarterstaves appear only in the expansion.
You can purchase a bastard sword +1 and a longsword +1 in Beregost. There are plenty of longswords +1 though, as soon as you go out of the main paths, and getting Greywolf's +2 Longsword is achievable early-ish following the main plot.
If you don't buy the shortsword +1 at Beregost, you can get a couple of them in Nashkel, from the assassin and in the mines.
There's a single two handed sword +1 in the game, and you have to loot it from a half-ogre.
There are a couple of warhammers +1 before Baldur's Gate, one of them in the bandit camp and another one in Peldvale. It might be actually easier to get the +2 from Bassilus in this case, but the combat can be hard for a low level group depending on how you handle the conversation with him.
So, yeah, you can buy a lot of +1 weapons as early as Beregost, but if you're just approaching the game for the first time it's unlikely you can have a well equiped party until quite a long stretch into the game. Equipping your party of 6 with magic weapons that suit them (blunt weapons, druid weapons, yadda yadda) happens naturally slowly unless you have some metagaming knowledge, as I said.