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Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

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Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#111

Post by anthk »

acomjean wrote: post #23
racl101 wrote: post #11

Huh, 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…

Rewind 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-...

Text adventures made against the Z-Machine had an "undo" command since forever.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#112

Post by mcphage »

capableweb wrote: post #88
mastercheif wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first game I remember having a "rewind" feature as a part of the core gameplay mechanics was Blinx on the OG Xbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinx:_The_Time_Sweeper

I was gonna say "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" was earlier, but seems it was released a year after Blinx. I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.

> I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.

Yep. Not 100% the same as Tears of the Kingdom—you turn the entire game clock back in Sands of Time, not individual items like in Tears of the Kingdom. But still.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#113

Post by mcphage »

toast0 wrote: post #62
voakbasda wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically, this is not how it actually seems to work. Instead, companies create an pipeline of patents, whereupon inventions are locked up indefinitely. Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to dr…

Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent th…

> Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection.

Not really—the point of patents is to publish information so that others can use it after a period of exclusivity. But if you can keep filing patents, preventing others from using that information indefinitely, then it defeats the purpose of the patent system.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#114

Post by mcphage »

freejazz wrote: post #75
ocfnash wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I salute your intention to find the silver lining but my experience reading patents is that they are hard to read. I believe this is because their job is not to convey information but rather to fulfill a legal requirement. I also believe that less restriction of these "inventions" would lead to a greater proliferation of truly useful explanations. No doubt there are exceptions but this has been my experience.

That would probably not be the case as companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything.

> companies would be obligated to wrap anything up in trade secret and never disclose anything

What in these patents would be locked away in a trade secret? They seem to be things you can figure out just by playing the game, or thinking about how it might be implemented. There's no secrets here.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#115

Post by somesortofthing »

toast0 wrote: post #62
voakbasda wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically, this is not how it actually seems to work. Instead, companies create an pipeline of patents, whereupon inventions are locked up indefinitely. Sure, the original invention may be available, but in the meantime, new patents were filed for improvements and refinements. Without those, the original patent cannot be made efficiently or cost effective. Plus, the new patents can be weaponized in the courts to dr…

Isn't this the system working as designed? If you want your thing to be protected, you've got to keep improving and refining it. When your 20-year old product is competitive with today's product, you lose your patent protection. As a competitor, you can also try taking the 20-year old product and refining it differently, too. Or if you're aggressive, you can build and refine current competitive products and patent th…

You only need to generate a single patentable refinement once every twenty years. In a lot of places, this is a horrible pace relative to the organic rate of progress. Compare the progress made since the main patents for FDM 3D printing expired compared to the progress made while it was still under patent.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#116

Post by jncfhnb »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #106
jncfhnb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 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.

Megaman X has an ice-skateboard that you can summon and then ride.

Could you find a video or reference to this? I can’t recall it.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#117

Post by cubefox »

Ironically, 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.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#118

Post by deafpolygon »

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #34

> 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 resul…

This has existed in Unreal Tournament 2003 where players can ride another player's vehicle simply by standing on it.

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#119

Post by hughesjj »

lehi wrote: post #107
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #31

If 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…

> I would be surprised if Nintendo uses any of these aggressively -- do they have a reputation of doing so? 2 years ago, Nintendo successfully sued a game developer for $30 million over a patent on touchscreen virtual joysticks. ( https://www.dualshockers.com/nintendo-lawsuit-colopl-white-c... )

Which is bonkers because I was using touchscreen joysticks on my iPad touch before 2010 to play wolfenstein

Re: Nintendo filed numerous patents for Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom mechanics

#120

Post by jimmygrapes »

pdntspa wrote: post #55
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're really curious to play a Nintendo game just emulate one.

You'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

It 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.
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