Sony is working on new tech that automatically changes game difficulty while you play

Sony has recently published a new patent that reveals the company is working on a new technology that changes the difficulty of a game in real-time.

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The new patent outlines a new technology that will be designed to adjust the overall difficulty of the situation the player is facing by analyzing how a player interacts with in-game mechanics and elements. This technology is officially called “Adaptive Difficult Calibration For Skills-Based Activities In Virtual Environments“, and it involves the use of algorithms designed to asses the aforementioned player interactions with the virtual world.

The idea behind this technology is increasing player engagement time with a game, as titles that include this technology will dynamically alter the difficulty to make sure a player is gaming at the perfect sweet spot of difficult, but not too difficult where they would want to give up and revisit it another time. Players’ competency levels will differ depending on the challenges ahead of them, and with this technology, players will essentially be able to have a tailored difficulty experience in-game.

Full Patent Abstract

“Methods of the present disclosure may collect data when a user plays one or more different types of games when determinations are made as to whether the difficulty of a game should be changed. The collected data maybe evaluated to identify whether a user gaming performance level corresponds to an expected level of performance. When the user gaming performance level does not correspond to an expected level of performance, parameters that change the difficultly of the game may be changed automatically.

Parameters that relate to movement speed, delay or hesitation, character strengths, numbers of competitors, or other metrics may be changed incrementally until a current user performance level corresponds to an expectation level of a particular user currently playing the game. At this time, the user expectation level may be changed, and the process may be repeated as skills of the user are developed over time,” reads the patent