Sony has published a patent that talks of amending in-game difficulty levels in real time as a player perhaps struggles or succeeds with certain elements
Sometimes, just sometimes a company also patents it so no one else can use the terrible idea, not even them. Sony has done it a few times in the past. They patented yelling at ads to do something iirc.
Thing is, it's fucking easy to dispute this patent because of how many other games already do something extremely similar. Adaptive difficulty isn't a novel idea. That they think they can patent it shows how broken that system is.
On a side note, the site had this other gem: New Sony Patent Will Let You Replay A Game From Any Point Possible. From the name, I thought they were patenting savestates, like those you do with emulators. But nope, it's dumber and more convoluted than that, closely tied to streaming, somehow.
I think the "novel way" in this case is the idea that games can look at your data from other games to adjust difficulty. So if you do well in God of War, the AI difficulty in the new Devil May Cry could get harder. Ditto the other way around.
I would say it's a newish idea. I don't see it as particularly innovative, though. We just don't do it NOW because it's stupid.
If it's optional, whatever, but if it's a forced game "feature", that would suck. I am perfectly capable of choosing the difficulty of the game I'm playing. Sometimes I want a good challenge, sometimes I don't, but I never need the game to decide for me that I'm taking too long or going too fast. Screw all of that.
I would be moderately peeved if the game just decided to let me win. Clearing the sword saint in sekiro was a triumph. If the game made it easier because I was taking a while, it would cheapen the win.
Some people don't enjoy the challenge and would probably enjoy this, though. Utterly alien to me, but they exist.
Bear in mind there are games like God Hand where it's constantly punishing as well. The game never gets easy, it just gets harder when you do well for too long.
Good news for you, then: This patent means companies other than Sony won't have adaptive difficulty for a whiiile. Remember how Crazy Taxi patented arrows pointing to your objective so every other game for 20 years had to do batshit indicators to get around it?
There's also a huge risk of this being misapplied. I remember way back in PS2 days, I was struggling with a jumping puzzle in the original God of War so much so that the game jumped in with a prompt offering to turn down difficulty. But turning down the difficulty in God of War reduces combat difficulty, nothing to do with the huge friggin' hole I kept falling into from mis-timing jumps.
Honestly, every game I've played that offers scaling difficulty based on performance has been because I sucked at the platforming parts that they couldn't make easier with a setting. Maybe it's a hint that I should stop playing platformers.
My biggest hate to any non-interactive difficulty is that players change.
What if I take a 1-year break? I haven't gone back to playing Go because I have a ranking I know I can't maintain, and do not want to play games where I'm giving handicaps to people who I won't be able to beat on an even level.
But yes, there's also "different things are harder to different people"
Huh, I didn't know about that mechanic in that series. I never really did end up liking L4D much, and thinking back on it, probably my biggest issue with the game was a feeling that I never really improved. No matter what I did, every time I played felt like I couldn't catch up, and it wasn't an enjoyable, "challenging" feeling. It was just frustrating.
In theory no, practically speaking the patent system is absurdly dumb around anything IT. Multiple patents which Apple won against Samsung with got invalidated which cut part of the awards issued
What I like more than this is when games make every individual aspect of difficulty (e.g. enemy health, enemy aggression, enemy damage, etc.) something you can tweak in the accessibility menu. Spider-Man 2 and The Last of Us Part 1 are two good examples of this.
1, remember that video game patents are rarely actually applied to anything real.
2, this has been a thing since at least the ps2, not in this globalized way, but games like ratchet and clank adjusted difficulty based on performance.
Almost as dumb as Nintendo patenting the concept of a sanity meter and then not fucking doing anything with it since Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
It is dumb as hell yeah. Well, probably smart in a business sense, because it's an excuse to collect more minute-by-minute user metrics for a seemingly innocent purpose (when really you know it's just going to be gamed to crank up engagement, and trick people into spending money - ie marketing)