What do you wish for when it comes to degrees of difficulty ?

I am not a big fan of difficulties that the only difference is the amount of hit points and damage the enemies do. On a personal experience I don't find it that interesting. If anything some of the numbers BioWare has posted over the years shows that I don't think its that big of a deal for their audience. According to the Mass Effect 3 infographic only 4% of the players beat the game on insanity.

To me I think a better idea is something BioWare has already implemented with the Trials in Dragon Age: Inquisition where you can pick and choose modifiers to help or hinder your game. Such as healing potions only heal 1 HP or that you cannot find more HP on a mission. There are other games like Halo or The Division 2 that have a modifier system in place already and I think that would make the game more interesting. The other thing I think that can be done to make the game have a bit more of a challenge is random enemies as a modifier of some sort. At least for me knowing what enemies are coming for me or what a boss does makes the difficulty trivial because I can remember what works against those enemies in those areas.

With that said I don't have a problem with something like a narrative difficulty where people just want to walk through the combat areas to experience the story.  The standard difficulty is the base for everything else and that is what the game is designed around.  The modifiers would be what makes the game harder from that point forward.

Seemingly a silly comment but if I want to play on hard or insane I want it to be hard and if I do not want it to be hard on a certain battle and put a slider to easy mode it should be easy. I am not the patient player I once was. I had one recent game I stopped playing because a relatively early battle suddenly went all dark souls hard, even on ultra easy mode it was annoyingly hard. I have not played the game since.

Not a fan of huge health point, just because, I'd personally like the game to scale with me, so that I'm not accidentally walking into an area that's too hard for me, or discovering something I'd lost, only for it to be a cakewalk.

I'd also like an NG+ so I can take my full build back through the game.

Just my opinion on this

That'll be an interesting topic to revisit after DA4 is out.

We've had a number of hints now that DA will move to a more action-oriented style of combat. So it might be... more accurate(?) to draw comparisons to games like God of War, Dragons Dogma, AC Odyssey, Shadow of Mordor, and other games in that vein.

I definitely liked the Trials mechanic though. Certainly wouldn't mind seeing something similar down the line.

I agree with several points brought up so far. I don't want higher difficulties to just turn enemies into damage sponges, because that makes fights tedious rather than just requiring more sophisticated strategies. I want a narrative difficulty that is actually easy, for those times when I'm just replaying a section to see different options, or when I'm short on time, or for fights that I just despise. I like DAI's trials and hope they will continue to be an option. New game plus is a must.

Now that I'm playing ME3 on insanity, I appreciate the fact that even the big enemies can (usually) be defeated quickly with the right strategy, and I don't have to stand there chipping away at neverending health bars. I'd like to see something like that in DA 4, with power combos that become more important on higher difficulties.

I want to still have a pause menu that allows me to control (or at least direct) my companions. I want to have access to all of my learned abilities during battle, without having to switch profiles.

I'd like them to take advantage of enemy (and ally!) weaknesses, especially lower level enemies. And while bosses should be challenging, their weakness should contribute significantly in taking them down. Whereas a with rage demon, for example, swords and bows will do the job over time, but a spell like Winters Grasp will deal with them almost instantly.

Same goes for the PC and companions; mages are susceptible to physical and anti magic attacks, but shrug off elemental and spirit damage. Rogues can dodge ranged attacks with ease, resistant to poisons and traps, but can't defend well against multiple onslaughts at once. While warriors can take a ton of physical damage, but can't defend against ranged area of effect attacks, such as bombs, or glyphs on the ground.

They should really play up the differences in the classes, and same goes for enemy classes too. Mages should have battlefield destroying and controlling spells, but super squishy etc.

Yeah, I think the DA fandom draws in a lot of players who aren't huge gamers in general, and this would probably make it even more accessible. Whenever I've suggested to my husband to try one of these games he always mentions being bad at combat. And honestly, even on easy, I could see him struggling sometimes.

I've noticed the "can't die" difficulty setting popping up in some indie games recently but haven't actually tried it. But I could see myself using it when playing a game with great story/characters but boring/tedious combat, or if trying to speed through just to try a different romance. However, I've wondered if the absence of the threat of dying might lower the stakes too much for my own personal tastes.

- Trials were a good first step into allowing us to set our own difficulty (I love fair weathered friends cause I find it hard to piss off companions in Inquisition unless it's on purpose)
- If there are puzzles I'd love a seperate puzzle difficulty (which knowing Bioware just means how hard is my tower of hanoi puzzle)
- High difficulty shouldn't up enemy health, it should lower mine. Ideally I want my hardest difficulty to be set around pre-planning quick fights where one mistake on either side is the death of us. Damage sponge enemies aren't ever fun.

This. I have gotten older and playing games where I constantly die because I missed a jump or didn't block fast enough are just another reason to insult and curse an inanimate object.

Damage sponge enemies can be pretty tedious to fight. I think most people agree with this, especially if it's a constant throughout the game.

Human or quasi-human enemies who can soak up massive amounts of damage for no logical reason always annoy me, unless there's at least a decent reason for it, such as power armor, possession, magic barriers etc. At the very least then there's some kind of 'fair' excuse, however flimsy for it.

Duke Prosper de Monfort from Mark of the Assassin is the textbook example of an illogical damage sponge human. This guy wasn't possessed by anything supernatural, he wasn't even a mage. He was an Orlesian noble, and nothing more - yet he was able to literally withstand hundreds of arrows, scores of fireballs, barrages of magic lightning, hundreds of flying daggers, even Merrill's 'rip 'em up from the inside' blood magic with barely a scratch, he just shrugged it all off as if he was protected by an impervious shell of high tensile steel, it made no sense.

So all I ask when it comes to difficulty is to make it make sense. Humans and quasi humans should not be able to literally soak up hundreds of arrows, daggers and magic, without a good reason. Sure, make them deal huge amounts of damage, make them smart, avoid or parry your attacks, flank you, set traps for you... all that good stuff but at least let them bleed and fall over if they have a big bloody sword stuck in their back.

I thought DAI struck a good balance. I haven't tried the easiest difficulty settings, but I imagine they're easy enough that you can enjoy the story without having to worry about combat being an issue, at least as long as you know the game controls and mechanics.

And then otoh, a difficult enough max-difficulty setting that you can be genuinely challenged as a player familiar with the game (though this wasn't really the case with Nightmare alone, it required several Trials as well), or at the minimum actually be at risk of dying/wiping from time to time, especially if undergeared or underlevelled for the area you're in or enemies you're fighting.

I feel like DA2, ME3, and MEA also struck a similarly decent balance, so I'm fairly confident they have a handle on this particular aspect of the game.

I wish for an option to resolve routine hostile encounters without having to fight. Most of the time, I find routine combat a useless distraction and want it to be over asap. An intimidation option (one that works most of the time if you, for instance, spend character points on it) would be one way to do it.