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After a long battle with the USPTO, Warner Brothers secured a patent for their bespoke Nemesis system, raising barriers for other developers.
Warner Brothers interactive entertainment ultimately won a victory in his long legal journey to obtain a patent for the Nemesis system he had built with Monolith Productions for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and his successor, Shadow of war. While this is widely seen as a success for Warner Bros., it will unfortunately create major hurdles for developers looking elsewhere to build enemy systems in the same vein or in the same vein as the highly successful Nemesis system.
While the black doors of Mordor are essentially closed Shadow of Mordor, with the game’s servers shutting down last month, it has consistently earned its place as one of the best video game adaptations of the the Lord of the Rings the universe, with the innovative Nemesis system which has achieved particularly high marks among developers and gamers. The Nemesis system, in short, uses procedural generation to randomly create Orc Generals and NPCs with their own names, visuals, stats, traits, strengths and weaknesses, and dynamic responses to the player, which affect how they respond. during subsequent interactions. The system was acclaimed for its innovation and was quickly adopted again in the still running suite, Shadow of war. It could even make its way into other titles published by the World Bank.
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Of course, with a potential cash cow of this size, Warner Brothers sought to protect its assets by filing a patent for the Nemesis system with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. While Monolith Productions was, as the developer of the game, responsible for building the Nemesis system, the patent would grant Warner Brothers, which acquired Monolith in 2004, full ownership of the system and its functions. This first attempt was rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that the patent was too similar to others that had already been filed. But four years of revisions and further attempts later finally paid off – Warner Brothers’ most recent application was accepted, as IGN reported, and as of February 23, the Nemesis system will be a fully copyrighted patent.
This will be good news for all the other WB-owned studios that Shadow of Mordor ‘s system, but creates problems for any other studio that is not. The success of the Nemesis system was mainly rooted in the fact that it simplified the generation of enemies on an unprecedented scale, and this type of technology can prove very useful for future open-world titles. Developers who want to create a system that uses all of the features outlined in the Nemesis System patent will have to license WB, or face contentious consequences – options that small independent studios probably can’t afford.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that developers aren’t able to create systems based on procedural generation, until they create direct translations of the Nemesis system. But systems aren’t easy or quick to build, and require a great deal of collaborative work to get done – and now any studio that tries to do so will have to keep an eye over their shoulder to make sure they don’t. not infringe the patent. in any way, lest it lead to Warner Brothers“Contentious anger.
Source: IGN
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