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.
It was. It created an amazing amount of unique stories for each players. I played the game twice but only finished it once. The second time was to make my own villain who became absolutely terrifying to see on the world map. My love for the Nemesis system was cemented by having that orc actually sneak up on me. I could see him wandering through the map and get closer and closer until the pin on the map disappeared - then he jumped out and ambushed me. I've never seen anything like it and loved being a badass with a personal bad guy who rivalled me.
My biggest problem with games like Shadow of War is they give me so many toys to play with that I never bother to finish the story. I was busy fighting orcs.
It is really cool. Shadow of Mordor needed to tame it down just a little, however. By the end of the game, that rival orc was immune to every weapon in my arsenal. It would only take damage from NPCs or environmental damage triggered by NPCs lol
The system itself is really cool, though! If you play either Shadow of Mordor or Shadow of War, just be aware that the story is complete fan fiction and some of it flies in the face of LOTR lore. Just don't take any if the story seriously and enjoy the game play for what it is.
No one ever bothers stepping on the toes of patents like these, so it's entirely possible that it wouldn't hold up. It's not a guaranteed win (nothing is), but doing nothing just lets corpos step all over artists in yet another way. We need more people, like Ross from Accursed Farms, to stand up for us, and we need devs willing to fight back against these ridiculous patents.
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.