I used to be totally purist "nobody goes down or I reload", and truthfully most times I still go by that. But ya know, sometimes after seemingly an hour of playing one battle over and over again, having a member of the party just get "knocked out" can be kinda refreshing… they get up, shake themselves off. Have a swig off the canteen, and we're progressing thru the game again.

I agree. DA ist nothing but as mature as it wants to be.

It would be just silly to market a game as being "dark & gritty" and not thinking this out to the consequences.

Otherwise it would be "dark & gritty for teenagers", then.

The death part of the game is what bugs me the most. I can't stand that my guys go down and then just get up without any kind of consequence (other than the -1 attribute which is fixed quite easily) It feels like cheating to me and frankly a little boring.

There's a hardcore mod out for DA: Origins now; version 1.0 has been reached.

There's no injury kits at all - if memory serves? (or very few…)

Health potions (poultices) only heal about 35% of what they used to do in the vanilla game.

There's some other changes also; I'll see what I can dig up…

Sounds good, aries. Thanks for the heads up.

This game is centered around the party members being able to shake off their wounds after a battle, but if you take that out of the picture then it will make the battles more intense. Hopefully they'll be much more interesting, but not impossible :)

Maybe, I'm just too used to my party based rpgs being like Wizardry, BG or even the gold boxes before that. This new style of playing takes a little to get used to. I'm not sure why I didn't mind it in NWN 2, but in this one it is annoying the heck out of me.

Edit: Just played the redcliffe area and OMG that was freaking hard. I was down to one guy against 3 and managed to just barely survive. I ran out of health packs and was down to using injury kits to heal him. I may have been very wrong about this combat style. That was a lot of fun.

The first time I tried it I got killed with 3 enemies left. Second time got wasted pretty quick, but the third time I changed my tactics a bit and it worked. Barely, but I survived. I may get into this combat after all. The thing about it was it wasn't impossible, just hard. I figured just the random encounters could be extremely difficult even after all I read about Redcliffe. I was dead wrong.