A wave of recent developments suggests that gaming companies are becoming increasingly concerned with helping new gamers. Now, Sony is looking to patent a way to help players with slower reflexes get better at a game more quickly. To this end, Sony is proposing a self-adjusting latency system that tailors itself to a player's ability.
Just last month, Sony seemed to be developing a system that would help adjust a game's difficulty in a more precise manner. The system would take into account inputs made by a player, compare them to other players moving through the same segment, and adjust the difficulty accordingly. With their proposed self-adjusting latency system, the gameplay would actually be slowed down in order to compensate for a player's abilities and reflexes. As the player gets better, the latency would then be reduced, bringing the player up to a full-speed gameplay experience.
In tandem, the latency adjustment and the difficulty adjustment could revolutionize the way new players are exposed to a game. If effective, the latency system could mean that players are always operating around their skill cap. But that's not all that Sony has in store for newcomers, it has also eyed a system for pairing experts and struggling players. While there are likely more innovations to come, this three-pronged approach of difficulty adjustment, latency adjustment, and tailored in-game help could completely change gaming.
Sony has also been recently looking at ways to improve account and friend management on their system. Interestingly, the latency system was also designed with this sort of application in mind. In the details, the system could double as a way to facilitate competition between friends of varying skill levels—similar to a golf handicap. Since the latency system would be automatically determined, a competition through a certain part of a game would be equally difficult for both parties regardless of their ability.
Related to that idea, Sony's new AI aimed at improving accessibility in conjunction with these other systems could foster a sense of inclusiveness never seen before in gaming. The system could reactively fill in missing features for players with disabilities such as color profiles, descriptive audio, and the like, and also adjust the latency and difficulty accordingly to any limitations they may have, and then, that same player could challenge a friend and they would compete on an essentially even playing field. The implications for the future of esports and speed run records are especially intriguing with this system in mind.