The game difficulty setting can be found on the Options screen, off the LEATHER®’s Main Menu. The difficulty refers to the challenge presented by your CPU opponent within each fight.
It’s always annoying when video games increase opponent difficulty artificially – typically with secret magic attribute bonuses. We’ve built the difficulty settings in LEATHER® in a better way: When you increase the difficulty from Easy to Moderate or Hard, behind the scenes your CPU opponent receives no artificial attribute boosts: the difficulty they pose is all down to the quality of the fightplan they formulate before each round.
On Easy, CPU boxers are much less aggressive, tending not to exert as much pressure on you as a Hard level opponent would. They’ll target head and body more evenly, and tend not to alter their strategy that much as the fight progresses. On Hard, CPU boxers will tailor and alter their overall aggressiveness much more dynamically. Moderate level difficulty falls between these two extremes.
For example, on Hard, if you’re soundly beating your CPU opponent in a 12 round bout he might get through round 6 and think: “I’m losing this fight, it’s time I upped my game”. Thus for the 7th round he’ll raise his work rate, or his intensity, or his aggressiveness, or even close the range slightly – or any combination of this kind of thing, to try to exert more pressure. At the other end of the spectrum, in that same situation the Easy difficulty level boxer might get to round 11 or 12 before arriving at that decision (when it’s clearly too late to turn the fight around) and will then only tweak their fightplan slightly (probably not enough to make any real impact).
Overall, Easy opponents will often seem to be just trying to survive bouts, rather than win, and are much less responsive to how a fight is progressing. Hard level opponents select their range better, adjust their aggressiveness better, will choose to target injuries to force TKOs, and will generally adjust their fightplan better as the fight progresses; they’ll target weakness, whilst attempting to mitigate their own.