Future installments of Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront, and other popular EA franchises could feature a unique difficulty system that adapts to a player’s skill level in order to keep them playing for longer sessions. This is according to a recent patent application filed by the publishing giant, which alludes to a “dynamic difficulty adjustment” process that operates on various prediction models to determine how challenging a title should get. Assuming that it comes to fruition, EA’s new adaptive difficulty system should be significantly more complex than those featured in older games such as Valve’s Left 4 Dead and Clover Studio’s God Hand.
The patent application was filed back in October 2020, and it was made public back in late March. The systems automatically adjust the difficulty setting of a game based on a player’s skill level and the desired duration of a game session. The systems mentioned in the application separate players into “user clusters” based on their skill level and adjusts a difficulty to a particular “seed” in order to keep those players engaged.