As the gang leader decimated my party for the third time in "Dragon Age Origins" I was faced with a tough choice, go off and grind out some levels or drop the difficulty. Seeing as I was already playing on "normal" this meant going down to the dreaded "easy" not usually a high point for gamers.
However, the more I thought of it the more I realized that my inherent shame in dropping down in difficulty level was absurd. The real reason I was playing Dragon Age was because I had heard so much about the game world, the cannon of the story. In review after review they raved about the storyline, the level of detail paid to the characters, the breadth of choices you could make. So in stopping to think about it, I realized none of these things really had much to do with how good I was at the fighting part of the game, I wasn't really trying to "play" the game as much as work my way through the story.
I also discovered that there is no "easy" mode in Dragon Age, the level below normal is called "casual". This lead me to believe that the developers themselves knew there'd be different types of gamers playing their game and that they would be looking to get different things out of the game. While some gamers play an RPG in order to complete the game under "hardcore" difficulty; others, like me, are picking up an old game to see what they've missed, to see what the hype is about and don't really want to be bothered with grinding a character to twenty levels before being able to fight a minor boss.
This isn't the case in other games where the fighting is the point. I can remember trying to pass the airplane level in Modern Warfare under the hardest difficulty solely for the achievement it granted you. In most FPS shooters, the satisfaction of the game comes in beating the levels, doing the actual grunt work, therefore it doesn't make sense to lower the difficulty unless you're a continue away from throwing your controller away through your television.
So I guess what I'm saying is, yes I'm playing Dragon Age on casual but it's okay because I don't care that I leveled up my character and got him enough skill points to be able to defeat the evil uncle. I'm more interested with what's going on with the blight and to see whether the party will ever make it to the lair of the archdemon, oh and also with hooking up with the witch from the wilds.
