I didn't find Dragon Age: Origins difficult. Oh no sir, the difficulty was something I kinda expected. Every death made sense to me in the game world.
And that's my problem with Dragon Age: Origins. Its design. Some deliberate choices and some things that were plain wrong.
I come from Mass Effect, mind you, and I was frankly hoping to play something more Mass Effect-y than KOTOR-y. Seems like I was wrong. I don't like playing a "coral game" in which I can't rely on the orders I give to my group of heroes, moreso when ME did demonstrate you could stop the game, tell people where you want them to stand and they'd understand it. I don't like having to choose a Tank character or having to control one because the AI tank character isn't capable of properly directing a battle. I don't like having to stick to prefab characters or redirecting some of them to very specific tech trees so I can rebalance their skills and turn them into something actually useful so I can have the people I like in my squad. I don't like not being able to go back and do something that for some reason or the other forgot to do or did wrong and which cost me a powerful ally. But most of all, I didn't like how broken everything felt.
Look, Mass Effect didn't feel unbalanced in that every character could more or less stand their ground on their own. Maybe some were better in some situations, but you could always struggle yourself free from most situations. Your character could heal, so you wouldn't have to depend on the ONLY specialized healing character of the game that appears halfway an event which is in a series of happenings that you can tackle in whichever order you want without any clue whatsoever about which one could contain said character. Also, Mass Effect didn't have a class that was heavily handicapped in most of the game, which as luck would have it, was the archer class, the one I inadvertently picked.
Moreover, the general strategy mechanics was excessively literal and simple in my opinion. I remember one mission in which you had a wall of fire in front of you and there was a horde of zombies heading your way. You could tell your characters to stay in position, which would make them attack ONLY in case a zombie went for them, or allow them to charge at the zombies THROUGH THE FUCKING FLAMES. There wasn't a middle point. I also remember taking on a dragon where I couldn't just take my character and fire away at it while avoiding flames because the healer ran directly to its fiery breath, the Paladin did nothing to avoid the flames either, and unless I specifically told him to do so, my other ranged character would also ran right below its sharp claws. It wasn't difficult goddamit! It was simplistic! I could virtually think of a million ways to tackle any situation that I couldn't do unless I painstakingly controlled each and every character, moving them one step at the time and absolutely controlling every move. Not because the game wouldn't do anything on their own, but because they'd move like retarded sandbags just waiting to die.
You could argue it's a more KOTOR-ish game, but that's beside the point. Yes, I also had a hard time playing a ranged character in KOTOR, but that's because I didn't choose the right class once they gave me that shiny lightsaber. I don't know, what's the point of creating a character the likes of you and delicately crafting them to your liking if sooner or later you'll just have to control it like in a glorified strategy-RPG hybrid?
So, don't make it less difficult. Make it tighter. That's what I think.
