Looking back, the nemesis system and active reloading in GOW not being implemented in other games made me realize the old style of game creation of implementing and improving was over. The nemesis system is truly innovative and there was several times that I was like fuck Sauron, this random orc that got several lucky kills on me MUST be destroyed.
The Nemesis system. Essentially, the system takes random enemies that the player defeats and has certain ones come back to try and enact revenge several times over until one enemy becomes an unscripted recurring villain throughout the entire game.
Wow it came out in 2014 and was patented in 2021 which means it's locked until 2028? That's not fair. The patent should have been 2014-2021 not 2021-2028. How can you patent something that's already released to the public, why is that allowed.
If.they delayed filing the patent they were more vulnerable than they had to be for those years. They would have had a weaker case to sue if someone imitated the system in their own game between the public learning about it and their patent filing date.
Of course it's worth mentioning that a competitor making something TOO similar (as in a copy or clone) would have run into the territory of copyright law, which requires no filing for protections to take effect.
I remember my brother describing the gameplay as a mix between Arkham and Assassin's Creed so the fact that it was originally going to be a Batman game makes sense to me.