After a long battle with the USPTO, Warner Brothers secured a tailored patent for its Nemesis System, raising barriers for other developers.
Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment finally secured a victory on his long legal journey to secure 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 advertised as a success for Warner Bros., it will unfortunately create some major hurdles for developers elsewhere looking to build enemy systems in the same vein or similar to the highly successful Nemesis System.
While the Black Gates of Mordor are essentially closed Shadow of Mordor, with game servers turned off last month, it still earned its place as one of the best video game adaptations in the Lord of the Rings universe, with the innovative Nemesis System earning particularly high marks between developers and players. The Nemesis System, in the shortest of terms, uses procedural generation to randomly create general orcs and NPCs with their own individual names, visuals, stats, traits, strengths and weaknesses and dynamic responses for the player, which affect how they will respond in subsequent interactions. The system received significant accolades for its innovation and was promptly adopted again in the sequence still in progress, Shadow of War. It may even be coming up with other titles published by WB.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view.
Of course, with a potential dairy cow that size, Warner Brothers sought to protect its assets by filing a patent for the Nemesis System with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. While Monolith Productions was, as the game developer, responsible for construction of the Nemesis System, the patent would grant Warner Brothers, which acquired Monolith in 2004, full ownership of the system and its functions. This initial attempt was rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that the patent was very similar to others that had already been filed. But four years of revisions and further attempts later finally paid off – Warner Brothers’ most recent order was accepted, as IGN reported, and as of February 23, the Nemesis System will be a patent fully protected by copyright.
This will be good news for any other WB-owned studio looking to Shadow of Mordor ‘s system, but it means trouble for any studio other than the Nemesis System’s success was mainly rooted in the fact that it simplified the generation of enemies on an unprecedented scale, and this type of technology can be very useful for future world titles Open. Developers who want to build a system that uses any features described in the Nemesis System patent will either have to obtain a license from the WB, or will face litigious consequences – options that small independent studios are unlikely to be able to afford.
This does not necessarily mean that developers are at a loss when it comes to building systems based on generating procedures, as long as they are not creating direct translations of the Nemesis System. But the systems are neither easy nor quick to build and require a great deal of collaborative work to be done – and now any studio that tries will have to keep an eye over its shoulder to make sure it is not infringing on the patent in any way. , so that it does not incur Warner brothers‘litigious wrath.
Source: IGN
About the author