After a lengthy battle with the USPTO, Warner Brothers has obtained a patent for its custom Nemesis system, creating barriers for other developers.
Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment finally got a win on its lengthy legal journey to obtain a patent for the Nemesis system it built with Monolith Productions for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and his successor, Shadow of War. While this is largely heralded as a success for Warner Bros., it will unfortunately create some major obstacles for developers elsewhere looking to build enemy systems in the same or similar vein as the highly successful Nemesis system.
While the Black Gates of Mordor are essentially closed Shadow of Mordor, with the game’s servers shutting down last month, it still earned its place as one of the best video game adaptations of the Lord of the Rings universe, with the innovative Nemesis system earning particularly high marks from developers and players alike. In short, the Nemesis system uses procedural generation to randomly create orc generals and NPCs with their own individual names, visuals, stats, traits, strengths, weaknesses, and dynamic responses to the player that affect how they will react in later interactions. The system garnered high praise for its innovation and was promptly reentered in the still-ongoing sequel, Shadow of War. It may even make its way into other titles published by WB.
Click the button below to launch this article in quick view.
Of course, with a potential cash cow of that size, Warner Brothers tried to protect its assets by filing a patent for the Nemesis system with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. While Monolith Productions, as developer of the game, was responsible for building the Nemesis system, the Warner Brothers patent, which Monolith acquired in 2004, would grant full ownership of the system and its functions. This first attempt was rejected by the USPTO because the patent was too similar to others that had already been pending. But four years of revisions and retries later have finally paid off – the most recent application from Warner Brothers was accepted, as IGN reported, and as of Feb. 23, the Nemesis system will be a fully copyrighted patent.
This will be good news for all other studios owned by WB Shadow of Mordor ‘s system, but causes problems for any other studio that is not. The success of the Nemesis system was mainly rooted in the fact that it simplified enemy generation on an unprecedented scale, and that kind of technology can be very useful for future open world titles. Developers wishing to build a system that utilizes all of the features described in the Nemesis System patent will have to obtain a license from WB, or face litigation consequences – options that small, independent studios are unlikely to be able to afford.
This doesn’t necessarily mean developers are down and out when it comes to building procedural generation based systems, as long as they don’t make direct translations of the Nemesis system. But the systems aren’t easy or quick to build, and require massive amounts of collaboration to achieve this – and now any studio that tries it will have to keep an eye over their shoulder to make sure it doesn’t infringe on it. patent in any way, so that it does not accumulate Warner Brotherslitigious wrath.
Source: IGN
About the author