Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment finally secured a victory in its longstanding legal journey to secure a patent for the Nemesis System it had built with Monolith Productions for Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and its 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 shut on Shadow of Mordor, with the game's servers having been shut 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 among developers and players alike. The Nemesis System, in the briefest of terms, uses procedural generation to randomly create orc generals and NPCs with their own individual names, visuals, stats, traits, strengths, and weaknesses, and dynamic responses to the player, which affect how they'll respond in later interactions. The system garnered significant acclaim for its innovation, and was promptly adopted again in the still-running sequel, Shadow of War. It might even be making its way into other WB-published titles.
Of course, with a potential cash cow of that size, Warner Brothers sought to protect its assets by filing a patent for the Nemesis System with the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2015. While Monolith Productions was, as the game's developer, responsible for the construction of the Nemesis System, the patent would grant Warner Brothers, which acquired Monolith in 2004, full ownership of the system and its functions. This initial attempt was rejected by the USPTO on the grounds that the patent was too similar to others that were already filed. But four years of revisions and reattempts later have finally born fruit - Warner Brothers' most recent application was accepted, as IGN has reported, and as of February 23, the Nemesis System will be a fully copyrighted patent.
This will be good news for any other WB-owned studios who had its eyes on Shadow of Mordor's system, but spells trouble for any other studio that isn't. The Nemesis System's success was primarily rooted in the fact that it simplified enemy generation by an unprecedented scale, and that sort of tech can come in pretty handy for future open-world titles. Developers who want to build a system that uses any features outlined in the Nemesis System's patent will have to get a license from WB, or face litigious consequences - options that small, independent studios likely can't afford.
This doesn't necessarily mean that developers are down and out when it comes to building procedural generation-based systems, as long as they're not creating direct translations of the Nemesis System. But the systems are neither easy nor quick to build, and require vast amounts of collaborative work in order to accomplish - and now any studio that attempts it is going to have to keep one eye over its shoulder to make sure it's not infringing on the patent in any way, lest it incur Warner Brothers' litigious wrath.
Source: IGN
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