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Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
- realusername 3y agoI'm pretty sure there's nothing revolutionary here, sandbox games have existed for a very long time and that loading transition isn't anything special.
- hospitalJail 3y agoSeems like they banked everything on their sandbox mechanic instead of the rest of the game. Maybe they plan to reuse it in the future. Although I think this time I'm done with Zelda for real.
- realusername 3y agoOh yeah sure, it doesn't mean the game is bad or anything, you can use the most obvious gaming mechanic and succeed, the execution matters a lot and the way it's done matters a lot. It's just not worth a patent though.
- Buttons840 3y agoYeah. I was gonna say something about Garry's Mod entering the room.
- foobarian 3y agoAh yes don't want a repeat of Genshin Impact
- hnlmorg 3y agoI’m unaware of Genshin Impact. Are you able to explain the reference?
- K5EiS 3y agoGoogling gave me this, but it might be something else: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/tbxyrf/genshin_impact_plagiarized_breath_of_the_wild_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/tbxyrf/genshin_impa...
- shigawire 3y agoIt's a gacha game (prints money with pseudo gambling micro transactions) that has the same look and mechanics as Breathe of the Wild
- lancesells 3y agoI don't know about the mechanics but the cel shading look of Breath of the Wild has been around since at least the Dreamcast with JetSet Radio. Making a shader using normals for the color values has been around a long time.
- loeg 3y agoA game that looks stylistically very similar to the recent Zeldas and has some similar game mechanics.
- alasdair_ 3y agoIt's extremely similar to the last couple of Zelda games both stylistically and in terms of game mechanics. The "climbing up a rock wall" mechanic is basically identical, for example. It's like chatGPT took the prompt "make a game just like zelda but with microtransactions".
- hermannj314 3y agoWe seem to always focus on the cost of the patent system, never the benefit. One day we will all be dead (or much older) and all of these features and patents will be freely available, described in significant detail to be reproducible, and the world will be a slightly more amazing place than it is now. If you look at all the expiring patents, many filed 20 years ago, you will find there are some neat things documented. It is awesome those are all available for use. The quid pro quo of the patent system is the other end of the pipe.
- jordanpg 3y agoI just wish patents were a little more accessible. I read and write these for a living and I have my doubts about how useful these are, in general, to members of the public. One great use case for LLMs is the translation of patents into short, easily-readable summaries.
- hermannj314 3y agoIs that a component of the patent system? It would be nice if there was (maybe there is) a "reasonable reproduction test" that required a patent's acceptance to be conditioned on someone being able to achieve the claim reasonably by reading it. Since the system exists for the benefit of humanity, I assume that is baked into the process?
- jordanpg 3y agoThere is a test like that. It's called the "enablement" test and you must enable someone to build the thing in order to get a patent. I'm talking more about the practical act of sitting down and reading a patent. They are long, boring, and filled with legalese. A patent may be 50 pages long, but the interesting part may fill no more than a few paragraphs and be described using nouns and verbs you've never heard before. It's completely possible to read a patent, look at the pictures, and still have no idea what the thing actually is. It's essentially legal abstraction -- inventors and patent attorneys don't want to be pinned down to a particular interpretation, implementation, or embodiment.
- racl101 3y agoHuh, didn't think there were that many new and innovative things even though the game was fantastic experience. The two things I really liked about TOTK was the ascend ability and the rewind / recall ability. Those were pretty cool and seemed novel to me. Admittedly, I don't play a ton of video games other than Zelda titles and the odd indie game so maybe those features are not novel and have been implemented before in other games.
- nomercy400 3y agoI haven't played TOTK, but when you say rewind-ability, it makes me think about Braid. Is it similar?
- monocasa 3y agoIn TOTK, it only rewinds a specific object rather than the whole world as in Braid.
- olnluis 3y agoSimilar, in a much a bigger scale, but with the big difference that Zelda applies rewind to objects instead of the whole level. Also, world state is not deterministic like Braid's levels, so entities can lose its rewindable status or have their state history modified depending on certain factors (a destroyed or lost object can't be brought back with rewind, etc.).
- acomjean 3y agoRewind was a gameplay mechanic in the pretty great 2d platformer “Braid”. There is a GDC talk about how it was implemented in 2010. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012210/The-Implementation-of-Rewind-in https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012210/The-Implementation-of-...
- racl101 3y agointeresting.
- willcipriano 3y ago
- _9hey 3y agoThis is amazing! This is how you share ideas with the outside world when corporate says “no open source”. It’s unlikely they’ll take anyone to court over this unless you copy their ideas verbatim
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- capableweb 3y agoYeah, why would Nintendo, a famously litigious company, take anyone to court if someone copied things Nintendo explicitly went and made into patents? Give me a break.
- no-dr-onboard 3y agoNintendo doing Nintendo things again. Honestly the whole article gives me flashbacks of the various legal battles that they've been involved in [1]. They seem to pay no mind to the effect their litigiousness has on competition and innovation in this area...as if it wasn't already hard enough. 1. https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/switch-hacker-gary-bowser-released-from-jail-will-pay-nintendo-25-30-income-for-the-rest-of-his-life/ https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/switch-hacker-gary-...
- manojlds 3y agoWhen clones like Genshin Impact exist, why do you blame Nintendo?
- loeg 3y agoDo you think Nintendo has or needs a monopoly on open-world cartoon-styled games?
- mattnewton 3y agoI’m a fan of breath of the wild / totk and didn’t really enjoy genshin impact. They really are very different games with a superficially similar cel shaded art style and open world. (But even then Nintendo’s art direction is totally different)
- throwaway09223 3y agoThere is nothing about Genshin Impact that is related to Zelda in terms of technology. The style is similar but style similarities isn't addressable through patents. BOTW/TOTK have excellent implementation and aesthetics but there is nothing about them that is technically unique or worthy of a patent.
- stale2002 3y agoI blame Nintendo because I think that they should compete in the market by making good games, as opposed to trying to stop other people from doing so themselves by abusing the legal system against competitors.
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- nottorp 3y agoSo... would you SNES nostalgics quit cloning Nintendo titles and giving them mind share? I've been toying with getting some of their hardware and finally seeing what the hype is about for years. This piece of news just saved me the money I would spend for a Switch or whatever follows it.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y agoIf you're really curious to play a Nintendo game just emulate one.
- nottorp 3y agoI'm scared I'll go to jail :)
- pdntspa 3y agoYou'll need someone to let you borrow their switch and dump their bios/firmware keys. I am not aware of any emulation that works without this ritual having been performed on real switch first
- jimmygrapes 3y agoIt would be totally unethical to search for "128bitbay" and I highly recommend that you never decode odd strings you may find as a result using base64 and definitely never go to the urls that may appear in the decoded string.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoIf anyone has worked with an IP attorney before then they know that filing patents is a stength-in-numbers approach. You don't file patents because you think you're a genius, you file patents to defend yourself and ensure an end state of mutually assured destruction. It looks like Nintendo threw everything against the wall to see what sticks, which is what a good IP attorney would recommend. It's unlikely these would hold up in a suit. I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so? Nothing to see here, if you ask me. (Sure, let's abolish parents, but you don't accomplish that by not playing the game. Instead you simply lose.)
- thomastjeffery 3y ago> what a good IP attorney would recommend. I think we could find a more useful word than "good". How about "useful"?
- joelfried 3y agoAgreed all around. Especially the part about abolishing all parents -- humanity definitely loses then.
- spookie 3y ago> I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so? They do have a reputation of suing everyone who "infringes their copyrights". I would assume they would do the same over patents. Hell, there's even one case where they tried to sue themselves.
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- SantalBlush 3y agoThey should patent their "tedious side quests with mundane rewards" feature so nobody does it again.
- pphysch 3y agoMeh, I'd rather have lots of side quests with mundane rewards for the quest-enjoyers than a bunch of "not actually side quest" side quests with near-mandatory rewards. Side quests should feel optional.
- SantalBlush 3y agoThat's not a real dichotomy. The third option is a reward that is neat or interesting, but not essential. It doesn't even need to be an item. Spoiler: The fashion/mayor side quest is a good example of such a reward. Korok seeds are not.
- moogly 3y agoThe side quests are quite boring and uninventive though. 95% of them are not even worth the reward, and then of course they sprinkle in 5% that really are, so you feel you don't really have a choice of missing out.
- pphysch 3y agoOkay, which game has better side quests?
- jallen_dot_dev 3y ago> The functionality seems at first glance to be a given for any game with a similar environment, but according to an observation by naoya2k, what makes Nintendo’s solution unique is that there are no physics working between Link and the dynamic object. Since both the character and object use physics, the most straightforward solution would be that Link moves together with the moving objects he is on top of as a result of physics (such as frictional force), but Nintendo apparently decided that what works better game-wise is Link being given the same movement that the object is performing, without any physics working between the two. No way this is the first game to ignore the player character in physics calculations. I'm pretty sure in GTA3 you could climb onto the roof of a car and not slide around as the NPC drives and makes sharp turns.
- matsemann 3y agoOr like every 2D platformer ever?
- jncfhnb 3y agoNot quite. It’s pretty rare to be jumping off and standing on top of moving physics objects in 2D platformers. Like in Mario almost everything you can stand on is static or following a fixed movement pattern.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI'm also wracking my brain for this situation in one of the many metroidvanias I've played. There are many which let the player freeze enemies so they can be used as platforms but the enemies are also not moving by that point. The most likely I can think of is Axiom Verge, which has a mechanism for "glitching" enemies that might allow for a non-frozen enemy to be used as a platform while it continues to follow the player character around. I'm not totally familiar with how each enemy glitches so it's only "likely" in the sense that I don't know it's definitely not possible.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
- jk_i_am_a_robot 3y agoExpand-a-band-band... patent stash!
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago0/10, you didn't do a magical maracas dance.
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- runjake 3y agoThe Darknet Diaries Team Xecutor episode[1] shows how gross Nintendo can be. It makes me consider boycotting them. tl;dr: They ruined some guy's life and well-being to make an example out of him, even though he was not the primary actor. 1. https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/136/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/136/
- keiferwiseman 3y agoTears of the Kingdom is just Breath of the Wild with Garry's Mod tacked on. Still a good game though
- no-dr-onboard 3y agoAlmost obscene to me that Nintendo is trying to patent something that Valve has had the opportunity (and denied taking action on based on principle) to patent for over 2 decades. Related [1] 1. https://twitter.com/_claypot/status/1688983045884293121 https://twitter.com/_claypot/status/1688983045884293121
- Melatonic 3y agoI feel like its also just generally a lot more full than BOTW - I encounter things to do constantly even in seemingly open spaces
- rcarmo 3y agoI don’t think so. Unleashing a cannon-topped Roomba into an enemy camp while you send stragglers over trees with a bouncy stick (mushroom fused to a stick) is quite enjoyable.
- dzeimis 3y ago> It just goes to show how thoroughly designed every aspect of the game is, whether apparent or running in the background. That sure is a weird way to say 'patent troll'.
- cubefox 3y agoIronically, Nintendo invented actually pretty groundbreaking stuff in the past, but apparently without patents, such as making the player character steerable while in the air (Super Mario Bros) or making 3D third person controls relative to the camera instead of relative to the player character (Super Mario 64). Basically every 2D platformer and 3D third person game uses these techniques ever since. Of course they also copied a lot of mechanics from other games themselves.
- notnmeyer 3y agoit’s kind of hard to like nintendo. the appear to be patent trolls and shamelessly resell earlier gen games at full price on subsequent consoles. it’s working for them but i don’t understand it.