Electronic Arts has patented some new technology that would allow it to gauge the difficulty of a video game during development. This would potentially allow EA to utilize this technology during beta testing of its games and hone each game's difficulty more closely.

There has been a lot of discussion about video game difficulty over the last decade. With the release of Demon's Souls in 2009 and Dark Souls in 2011, the concept of difficulty in RPGs shifted, and the acceptance of challenge as an aspect of design took more mainstream prominence. "Souls-like" games such as Nioh and Code Vein started to crop up, continuing on the path that FromSoftware had opened up. More recently, questions about the difficulty level of rogue-like games such as Hades and Returnal have sparked up the great difficulty debate again.

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EA's new technology aims to use artificial intelligence to quickly simulate the experience of playing the video game and then determine the difficulty level of the game based on a number of metrics. While looking for extreme levels of difficulty in games is a prominent aspect that the AI will look for, the patented technology looks at difficulty in a number of ways. Notably, it not only looks for high and low levels of difficulty, but also large spikes or drops.

The boss Phrike from Returnal

 

Specifically, text in the patent suggests that "inconsistent difficulties among various aspects" of a game could cause players to lose interest, and that if a level is much more difficult than other levels in the game, a "vast majority" of players could fail to complete it and "lose interest in the whole video game" as a result. While much of the conversation around games like Demon's Souls and Returnal is about high levels of difficulty, EA's patent also looks at low difficulty as an equally important issue, suggesting that users lose interest when the difficulty level is too low.

This patent by Electronic Arts could certainly revolutionize the way developers not only deal with difficulty settings in video games, it could also see a new streamlining and automation of beta testing. The patent suggests that beta testing is often inaccurate on account of a "small sample size" and that users who are much better than the average gamer may be skewing the developer's assessment of the game's difficulty during this period. While using artificial intelligence to gain a more intricate understanding of video game difficulty may be a great testing tool, it does seem somewhat ominous for those working as professional video game testers.

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Source: USPTO