Sony applies to patent dynamic difficulty settings that respond to your performance, one year after EA did the same thing with controller settings
Sony has applied to patent systems that automatically fiddle with «parameters that change the difficulty of the game» based on your performance, a patent on the World Intellectual Property Organization's website reveals. (Actually, the patent reads «difficultly» at the time of writing, so Sony may in fact be referring to the implementation of dynamic cults.
But probably not.)
As spotted by Eurogamer, Sony's proposed system would allow a game to adjust its difficulty settings—«movement speed, delay or hesitation, character strengths, numbers of competitors» and so on—based on «an expected level of performance.»
The idea isn't new, though the implementation may well be. We're all familiar with Left 4 Dead's AI director, which sends swarms of enemies at you based on your performance (along with some RNG), a feature adopted by other games including Alien Swarm and The Anacrusis.
Outriders' world tier system also works in a similar way, though it functions more like an XP bar where you lose points if you die.
It's also not as novel as one might assume. Last year, EA gained a patent for controller settings based on similar player inputs, which were «intended to improve performance of the user in relation to the software».
Granted, EA's version specifically targets controller input whereas Sony's patent appears more broad, which brings up the question of potential overlap.
For example, if the «delay or hesitation settings» mentioned in Sony's patent were to impact your aiming sensitivity on a controller, you could possibly make the argument that those settings are nudging into EA's patented turf. Whether either company would bother with such a granular legal tangle is another question entirely—and it's all hypothetical
