• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Warner Bros. patented 'Nemesis system' from Mordor, could be used in Batman and/or Harry Potter

cormack12

Gold Member
Source: https://www.gamesradar.com/au/middl...s-nemesis-system-was-patented-by-warner-bros/
Source: https://segmentnext.com/2021/02/03/warner-bros-trying-file-nemesis-system-patent/

Patent pending: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160279522A1/

Methods for managing non-player characters and power centers in a computer game are based on character hierarchies and individualized correspondences between each character's traits or rank and events that involve other non-player characters or objects. Players may share power centers, character hierarchies, non-player characters, and related quests involving the shared objects with other players playing separate and unrelated game instances over a computer network, with the outcome of the quests reflected in different the games. Various configurations of game machines are used to implement the methods.

One of the most distinctive features to come out on video games last console generation was the Nemesis System, the big moneymaking attraction of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel, Shadow of War. Now, however, a Nemesis system patent may be in the future from Warner Bros if they’re lucky.

The Nemesis system specifically kept track of the various different Orc officers spread throughout the game. Each one had a different personality, different method of fighting, and different strengths and weaknesses. They also remembered victories and defeats that you and them inflicted on one another.

This helped to create a huge amount of emergent storytelling, allowing you to form rivalries between you and a captain, or engage in politicking among the different captains by manipulating them against each other. It was a novel system, and part of the reason the games were such a success.

As pointed out in the Game Maker's Toolkit video below (around the 19 minute mark), Monolith filed a patent for the system back in 2015, securing the idea of "methods for managing non-players characters [...] based on character hierarchies and individualized correspondences" for themselves.



The games created their own intricate web of orcs, each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and relationships to other enemy NPCs. Take out a captain, for example, and a subordinate could rise to take his place. Humiliate that same captain by exploiting his fear of fire, and his peons might stage something of a hostile takeover. Fail to take a character out, and they might rise up through the ranks to torment you again later on.

Outside of Shadow of War, however, no Nemesis-esque system ever showed up, likely the result of the 2015 patent - which progressed to its final stage last year - severely limiting the number of devs prepared to build on Monolith's idea.

Of course other devs have mimicked it with the likes of AC using order members, mercenaries, bounty hunters but not to this reactive depth.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Patenting the idea was a shame, but I'm not convinced other devs would've picked up the ball to run with it.

Playing through a HP rpg and having different rival classmates based on your house and your class activities seems like a slam dunk idea to me tho
 
A method comprising:
controlling, by a processor, game events in a computer-implemented game, the game events involving an avatar that is operated in response to input from a player, and a first non-player character that is controlled in response to a first set of character parameters defined in a computer memory and in response to operation of the avatar;
detecting, by the processor, occurrence of a predefined game event involving the non-player character;
changing, by the processor, a second set of character parameters defined in a computer memory for control of a second non-player character in the game based on the detecting; and
outputting, to an output device, an indication of the second set of character parameters that are changed by the changing.

Hmmm so it looks like they did a pretty good job of protecting the scenario where you meet with a first NPC and based on that meeting something may happen with a second NPC behind the scenes like they take over for the first first npc. I am pretty surprised this got granted that nobody was doing it before.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
What a stupid patent. Instead of protecting something all it has done is insure that an otherwise good idea never gets used by anybody.
 
Last edited:
Top Bottom