Deathloop will have adapative difficulty, won't allow save scums

Players won't be able to escape the restrictions of the unique gameplay experience that Deathloop seeks to offer, and maybe that's for the best.

Deathloop, the upcoming time-looping action-adventure game by Arkane Studios, will hold players by the collar.

While most games will give players all sorts of options to make gameplay easy for them, Deathloop lies in the camp of making sure you experience what it wants you to. As such, developers Arkane Studios revealed that the game will offer no difficulty options, and players can only have a single save file. That means no save-scumming and no easy mode. Instead, players will be playing with an “adaptive difficulty” system in place.

As reported by Gameranx, Deathloop devs took to Discord to answer the questions of their fans. Regarding the save files, the devs say: “There is only one save. Having more than one is not really useful in our one-day loop context. If you want to try something different, just do it another day.” That does make sense, considering that the game traps the player in a time loop, where dying means you start again from the very beginning of the day in-game.

Meanwhile, as for the adaptive difficulty, Arkane Studios comments: “There is no difficulty option, but we have an adaptive difficulty system. As you can play the same maps several times at different moments of your play-through, we had to think about a system that can make the game challenging the more you play. If the NPCs accuracy is forgiven at the beginning, they will be more accurate, aggressive, and reactive the more you perform.”

Deathloop launches on September 14, 2021, on PC and as a launch exclusive on the PS5. While Arkane Studios is a subsidiary of ZeniMax, which has been acquired by Microsoft, Microsoft chose to honor the deal with Sony to launch the game only on the PS5. The Xbox Series X will come a year after launch.