After a long battle with the USPTO, Warner Brothers obtained a patent on its Nemesis system, which raises barriers for other developers.
Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment finally achieved a victory in his years-long legal journey to obtain a patent for the Nemesis system he built with Monolith Productions for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and his successor, Shadow of War. Although largely as a success for Warner Bros. announced, it will unfortunately create some major obstacles for developers elsewhere who want to build hostile systems in the same or similar vein as the highly successful Nemesis system.
While the Black Gates of Mordor are essentially turned on Shadow of Mordor, with the game’s servers shutting down last month, it still deserves its place as one of the best adaptations for video games Lord of the Rings universe, with the innovative Nemesis system achieving particularly high marks among developers and players. The Nemesis system, in the shortest terms, uses procedure generation to create random generals and NPCs with their own individual names, imagery, stats, attributes, strengths and weaknesses, and dynamic responses to the player, influencing how they will react in play. later interactions. The system received considerable praise for its innovation and was immediately re-adopted in the ongoing sequel, Shadow of War. It could even start in other World Cup-published titles.
Click the button below to start this article in a quick view.
Of course, with a potential cash cow of magnitude, Warner Brothers sought to protect its assets by filing a patent on the Nemesis System with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. While Monolith Productions was responsible for developing the game. was for those with the construction of the Nemesis system, Warner Brothers, which acquired Monolith in 2004, would grant full ownership of the system and its functions. The initial attempt was rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that the patent was too similar to others already filed. But four years of revisions and retries later paid off – Warner Brothers’ most recent application was accepted, as IGN reported, and from February 23, the Nemesis system will be a full copyrighted patent.
This will be good news for any other WB owned studios Shadow of Mordor ‘‘s system, but spells problems for any other studio that is not. The success of the Nemesis system was mainly rooted in the fact that it simplifies the hostile generation on an unprecedented scale and that this kind of technology can come in quite handy for future open world titles. Developers wishing to build a system that uses any of the features set forth in the Nemesis System patent will need to obtain a WB license or have direct consequences – options that small, independent studios are unlikely to be able to afford.
This does not necessarily mean that developers intend to build systems that yield procedural generation, as long as they do not create direct translations of the Nemesis system. But the systems are neither easy nor fast to build, and require large amounts of collaborative work to accomplish – and now every studio that tries them will have to keep one eye on its shoulder to make sure it does not infringe the patent. in any way so that it does not go on Warner Brothers‘litigical wrath.
Source: IGN
About the author