Isnt this done by many games already?
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Yeah, but now we get to be robbed of a feature, like we were when Namco patented playing mini-games on loading screens. We needn't have suffered as much during the worst years of loading.
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.
🙌 McDonalds!!!!
;_; TIL....that would have been awesome.
It's kinda like the dinosaur on Chrome when your internet goes out. It's plays a little minigame until it comes back online.
A lot of arcade games already do this.
Sony is making sure they can't do it in the future
Only if no one challenges it, which is a big problem.
Patents are supposed to be given for new ideas, and also a certain degree of non-obviousness.
In the event that something has been done before by others, it should be open and shut to challenge the patent, but it still costs money. So it's often easier not to, and the patent doesn't get challenged.
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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.
Anyway, fuck Sony and this patent bullshit
afaik software patents get awards based on the implementation details. So Sony could get a patent if they implemented this behavior in a novel way.
Although I do agree with you this is a basic feature in many games and that sold be recognized.
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.
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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.
Dynamic difficulty has its place. For example, most people don't want to die to the same boss over and over again. That's just not good gameplay and it's overall a waste of time.
Instead, a dynamic difficulty system could very slightly adjust some values each time you die: a few points off the enemy HP, juice your damage a bit, slow the boss down. It can be made so subtle that you don't even notice it happening.
Resident Evil 4 has a dynamic difficulty and people praise it for that. It keeps you moving through the game instead of feeling defeated when you have to manually reduce the difficulty or when you get stuck in the same area for a long time.
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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.
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Fuck you sony. I have still not forgiven WB Studios for patenting the nemesis system and never using it anymore.
Does this mean other game publishers get sued if they use dynamic difficulty?
No. Only if they use the same system. That's what's being patented, not the concept of dynamic difficulty.
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Compile did this like a million years ago in Zanac.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a39cf9072d54b83f4d31f2b20cf525c4/tumblr_mslnpg9cGx1qbw2q1o1_1280.jpg
I might have a one sided perspective because I play mostly roguelites. To me that sounds like a horrible idea. When playing a game, I want to get good enough to beat one difficulty and then move on to the next. For that I need to be able to choose the difficulty myself. If the difficulty constantly changes without the players control it becomes impossible to get acquainted to a certain difficulty and even worse, there is no more challenge because whenever you encounter a challenging part of the game the game will just turn down the difficulty, instead of the player having to improve. What is even the point of "beating" such a game then? The people who come up with nonsense like this obviously don´t play games themselves and don´t understand at all what gaming is about.
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.
Yes, that is indeed another good point against scaling difficulty.
It's worse with this particular case because the patent is for cross-gaming. You suck at competitive Street Fighter? The next turn-based JRPG difficulty goes down.
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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"
CS:Go? fwiw, your rank resets after not playing a while, so you might not feel that way if you hop back in
No, sorry. The board game Go. I used to play fairly heavily in long games on OGS and got to a fairly good (not if you ask anyone actually good) rank. Then I took a break and tried to play some real-time games and I'm so many ranks weaker than my profile it's not even funny.
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laughs at Sony because of the inevitable patent challenge from Valve via Left 4 Dead.
The original Homeworld also scaled difficulty based on how well you were doing on previous levels.
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.
One of the defining concepts in the game was the "director", an overarching map managing system that kept the desired pacing of the game in real time.
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So like left 4 dead 2 then
RE 4 (original), every Ratchet and Clank game, Space Invaders by complete accident, etc
Yeah, a lot of games do it under the hood without anyone even noticing.
And some spell it out and make it a main feature, like Rimworld and its "storytellers".
They're actually rather basic, but they check how well the player is doing and adapt the threat level accordingly.
Well, if they're not Randy, anyway.
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fuck you, sony!
Why copyright this? They do more harm to the industry than their games and consoles can ever compensate!
Patents != Copyright.
Also, they can't patent this, there's too many prior games that already do this. As soon as it goes through they're going to get challenged in court and lose handily
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.
Don't Starve is probably the supreme example of this. It's great. You can adjust difficulty in specific areas.
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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.
As long as you can still manually change the difficulty or turn it off, it sounds like it could be interesting.
I'd be frustrated if I kept having to adjust it back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nJtd8AJghM&t=0 Interesting video why dynamic difficulty isn't the holy grail. Hope they leave it in as an option and don't force it on the player
I'm fine with dynamic difficulty, if it's something that the designers bake into the game, which is already done in many cases.
Yeah but this is about sony fucking patenting the concept, which is dumb as hell.
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