Difficulty settings (Origins)

There are four difficulty settings for Dragon Age: Origins: Casual, Normal, Hard, and Nightmare. Difficulty settings alter a variety of aspects including enemy AI, enemy resistances, and friendly fire. The game is tuned to be played at the Hard setting from the view of a veteran player, meaning that at this setting neither the player's party nor the enemies have special bonuses or limitations. Senior technical designer Georg Zoeller prefers to refer to them as "Challenge Settings".

The difficulty setting can be changed at any time and will immediately affect the current situation. Limitations or restrictions in AI include prioritization of abilites, targets, group tactics, etc. They don't alter enemy stats like hitpoints, for example.

Friendly Fire
Certain spells may affect the caster's allies with their negative effects if the caster does not make sure to avoid that. For the player's party the strength of the effect is tied to the difficulty setting. For the enemies it has not been stated yet. Spells which are subject to friendly fire typically manifest physical effects, while spells with spirit or mental effects are expected to be completely controlled by the caster and therefore have no unwanted results.

Friendly fire does not affect projectiles like arrows but may affect grenades. Damage reduction through difficulty setting is calculated before mitigation through resistances.