The four difficulty settings for Dragon Age: Origins are:
A word about Nightmare difficulty
Nightmare difficulty is designed to provide a challenge to players not content with the challenges that the hard difficulty setting is offering. This mode is punishingly hard and requires the player to understand all aspects of the game in order to overcome their enemies. A well planned character and optimized playthrough path are required to succeed in this mode.
Players should NOT try to play on Nightmare the first time they play the game, it is guaranteed to be not fun that way.
Difficulty settings in Dragon Age: Origins can be switched on the fly at any point from the game options menu, and the effects are instantaneous. Difficulty is stored on the player profile, not savegame.
The different difficulty settings in Dragon Age: Origins exist to allow the player to customize the challenge level and game experience to their liking. Because of this, no achievements or other encouragements (such as higher experience gain) are given for playing on higher difficulties. It also encourages players to temporarily switch to a lower difficulty when stuck at a particularly hard battle.
The following table explains some of the technical details of how different difficulty settings affect the game. These values pertain to the PC version of the game and are significantly altered on the consoles to compensate for the different control scheme of the game.
| Setting | Casual | Normal | Hard | Nightmare | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attack Bonus | 20 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Implicit Attack bonus given to the party members. |
| Defense Bonus | 20 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Implicit Defense bonus given to the party members. |
| Damage Bonus | 7 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Implicit Damage bonus given to party members. |
| Healing Modifier | 175% | 100% | 85% | 85% | Effectiveness of healing spells. |
| Rank Damage Scaling | 2 | 7 | 9 | 16 | Amount of damage at which rank damage (down)scaling kicks in. Lower means easier. |
| Enemy Spell Resistance | -10 | 1.5 | 2.5 | 5 | Bonus % to resist spells given to enemies. |
| Player Spell Resistance | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Bonus % to resist spells given to party members. |
| Enemy Damage Resistance | -10 | 0 | 5 | 5 | Bonus % to damage resistance given to enemies. |
| Player Damage Resistance | 25 | 0 | 0 | -5 | Bonus % to damage resistance given to party members. |
| Reactive Potion Limit | 20 | 12 | 8 | 0 | Limit of potions after which the loot system will no longer prefer potions. |
| Reactive Potion Chance | 1 | 0.75 | 0.5 | 0.25 | Chance for the loot system to substitute other loot for potions if party limit not reached. |
| AI Ability Frequency | 1 | 1 | 1.25 | 1.5 | Modifier for the AI to prefer the use of high powered abilities. |
| Trap Damage Scaling | 0.50 | 1.00 | 1.25 | 1.50 | Scaling factor for trap damage. |
| Friendly Fire | 0% | 50% | 100% | 100% | The percentage of damage friendly fire generates on party members. |
Nightmare also modifies the AI behaviour slightly.
Dragon Age employs a complex but limited system for challenge scaling. See Challenge Scaling for more details.