Sony has patented a system that adjusts the difficulty of video games without you noticing.

Sony patented a feature that allows automatically adjust the difficulty of video games. The technology company aims to develop a system that analyzes a user’s skills and makes changes on the fly. This function will be dynamic and will search increase player satisfaction.

Patent, Adaptive difficulty calibration for skill-based activities in virtual environments., published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). According to the document, Sony intends to transform the difficulty options found in modern video games, since they do not always match the capabilities of the player.

“When the game moves from one level to another (for example, from medium to hard), the challenges provided can cause a user who performs very well on medium difficulty to perform very poorly on hard difficulty,” mentions Sony. “Because modern games have fixed difficulty levels, a user who enjoyed playing on one level may not enjoy playing the game on a higher difficulty level.”

Suggested Solution a method that allows changes to be made based on the player’s abilities. This system will be dynamic, so if you start with an easy level, you can progress to a more difficult level as your skills improve.

To do this, Sony will collect data from your session and analyze whether your performance is as expected on this difficulty. If not, then the game will change parameters such as the strength of your character, the number of enemies and other indicators.. The technology company will use servers and cloud technologies to make comparisons and make necessary adjustments.

PlayStation games to suit your skills

The patent aims to improve the satisfaction of a gaming session. Difficulty is always an obstacle and some users get frustrated and quit the game. Although the developers have implemented different levels, Sony believes that a change in methodology is necessary.

Dynamic difficulty adjustment is not new. Electronic art registered a similar patent in 2021, in which suggests using machine learning and artificial intelligence analyze and change individual parameters during the game. EA mentions in its document that in some cases this function will be invisible to the user the final.

“Developers usually want their software to keep users engaged for as long as possible. The longer a user interacts with the software, the more likely it is to be successful. The relationship between length of user interaction and software success is especially true for video games. The longer a user plays a particular video game, the more likely they are to enjoy it and therefore the more likely they are to continue playing.”

An important feature of the EA patent is that perform historical analysis of your information suggest a level of difficulty. This is possible thanks to data collection, which is already included in several of its titles and which we enable (or disable) upon first launch. If the suggested level is not optimal, the system will continue to adjust dynamically.

It will be interesting to see if Sony’s new patent materializes and becomes the standard for future PlayStation games.