Make it challenging
It is a matter of personal taste when it comes to how difficult a player wants their game. BG was created with the idea of making battles far more tactical then games had before. This meant the player should get killed if they just charge in with no plan or prep to a new battle. The idea was to make sure the player took time to plan out a battle instead of hoping you could smash your way through an encounter.

Dragon Age is taking a lot of years of lessons in creating RPGs here and that includes how difficult the game is. I like being tested but on the other hand I hate playing a game where I get killed every 11 seconds. This usually does not happen in RPGs as it's more of a FPS type game (worst game for this in recent memory Tron-I got killed 34 times in 12 minutes- I call this an Eggshell game where your main character must be made from egg shells).