I've been somewhat enjoying this game, but so far it's been a spoon of crap for every two of honey. The story is really good, but too often I find that I'm trapped in an unwinnable fight so it becomes harder and harder to enjoy the story and dialogs, when I know there is non-trivial chance I'm in an unwinnable sequence that I can not escape that will force me to reload a save from forty minutes ago and eventually replay all of those dialogs again. It's fun to try to think about the responses and the consequences of those choices, less so the second or third time around skipping through them.

So is there an order in which you should visit various towns, did i go too far too early (I went to the Delish camp)? And it has stuff like: [spoiler] The camp where you have to fight a powerful shade with a single mage, which isn't close to possible; a mass of skeletons appearing around you, which is winnable, but I had pause every second to heal, eat potion (and retry it five times); Zathrian fight, that had to retry a bunch of times until I gave up and switched to 'easy' [/spoiler] And the thing is that the regular enemies would pretty easy, so you don't think that you're in the area that's too far or that you need to do more leveling or whatever, and them BAM, near impossible fight.

Are there any tips or advice that people follow to avoid having to reload all the time? It seems like a good game, and I want to have fun playing it

What is your party exactly and what your skills are? That shade part is ment to be hard, especially cause it forces party limit.... but besides that everything depends on approach. Like KokoSabre said - get familliar with the game, mechanics, skills and equppement first, even on lower levels. While I'm not pro, but now the game can be challenging, but not as impossible as you mentione it.

The "natural" progression of the main story zones is Redcliff -> Mage's Tower -> Denerim -> and then either the Brecilian Forest or Orzammar in some order. I state this because the main plots in each area will take you through the first three of those in that order. Doing the Mage's Tower first gives you the earliest opportunity for permanent stat boosts, but note that you will be committed to that quest fairly early on. However, it gives you access to a second mage companion that starts with Heal, which is a big boon to your survivability if Morrigan does not have it yet.

Nothing stops you from using a different order, but Orzammar in particular is meant for higher level characters, and the game forces you into a challenging early battle in that area to reinforce this.

For party balance, I find it easiest to go with two ranged characters and two melee characters covering all three of the classes. Use Alistair as your "tank" character if you are not playing a weapon-and-shield warrior yourself.

If you have the DLC, then the standalone campaigns award you (potentially unbalancing) equipment on new playthroughs of the main DAO campaign. These are not necessary to complete the game in any way.

Keep in mind that you can change the game's difficulty setting at any time. If you are struggling with Normal, then try Easy until you feel more comfortable with combat strategies.

You should post your character build and preferred companions so more tailored advice can be given to you.

Thanks everyone, I guess i did jump the gun by leaving Lothering too early, so I don't have as many options. I wanted to finish that Zathrian fight, so that I don't have to load a previous save and go through all the dialogs again, but it looks like I have to anyway to finish Lothering. Oh well, I'll switch it to "easy" so that it's a bit more manageable and consider the order HanSewLow has suggested.