The game auto loading your most recent save can overwrite your difficulty.
This is an issue with cloud saves and uninstalling and reinstalling the game.
I was playing the game on my HTPC with the difficulty set to hard. I decided I wanted to try combat with KB/M and switched over to my main PC. As soon as the game booted I noticed not all my settings were synced between the 2 PC's. So I set the games difficulty back to hard, readjusted my video settings, then went in to play. I played for about 20 minutes before reaching another save point, overwriting my previous save that said hard, then noticed it said medium. I went back to my game settings and there it was, difficulty on medium. I know for a fact I set it to hard when I launched it on my main PC. I'm assuming the game loading your most recent save while launching is the culprit. Since my settings didn't fully sync between PC's the game started loading my save on medium difficulty as soon as I launched the game on my second PC. Even though I changed the difficulty to hard before selecting continue, the game state was already on medium. So when I selected continue my hard difficulty choice was overwritten by the game being loaded on a different difficulty. There was little way for me to notice until I got to a save station and already overwrote my save. I'm only worried about being locked out of difficulty achievements since now I've played a portion of the game on medium. I don't see any in the achievement list but 10 are hidden so I don't want to risk it. Restarting my playthrough just in case.
The easiest way to recreate the issue is with 2 PC's.
Install dead space on PC 1. Launch, set difficulty to hard, play until a save point, quit.
Install dead space on PC 2. Let steam cloud sync. Set difficulty to hard in menu before clicking continue.
After selecting continue you'll notice the difficulty in game is still set to medium regardless of the choice earlier on the menu.
There's 2 routes I thought of for fixing the issue. 1 is syncing difficulty between PC's. It should be possible since your orient view to locator path and log close mode settings both synced between my 2 PC's. Just difficulty didn't.
The second fix is disabling auto loading cloud saves when you boot the game on a PC that did not natively make that save. This gives the user an opportunity to adjust their settings before clicking continue.
For now if users want to avoid this affecting their playthrough they can select load game rather than continue when loading the game for the first time on a second PC. It's just not the type of thing a user would think of doing until they've already been affected by it.
