Shack: One prominent SiN Episodes feature is auto-adjusting difficulty. Tell us about that.

Ritual: The dynamic difficulty system is something we invested a lot of time and effort in. The basic premise is that the system constantly analyzes your style of play and then creates a customized challenge to suit that style.

As you play the game, that challenge is constantly refined and updated, so even as you get better and become more skilled, the game will remain challenging. To pull this off, we have a number of so-called Advisors tracking a ton of parameters, including obvious things like your health and your accuracy, but also seemingly outlandish stuff, like how much you jump during combat.

Based on these observations, the Advisors then make suggestions to another module called the Decision Maker, which will take a few of those suggestions and implement them. It then checks to see if the changes had the desired effect or not.

The advantage of this system is that we can track a ton of stuff and really get an idea of how you play the game. For example, it can tell if you go specifically for headshots and make the enemies in the game wear bullet-proof helmets in response. It might also tell the enemies to strafe more and to use cover more effective if your accuracy reaches a certain point. This goes so far as enemies being able to tell when you're aiming at them, so they can get a move on and get out of the line of fire. These are just a few of the many adjustments our system can make in order to respond to particular player actions, which is what makes it truly dynamic.