Nintendo’s magical whimsy tends to fade away when you look into its operations and realise how litigious the company is not just to its consumers, but also fellow development studios and creatives. Nobody does it like Nintendo, although how much of that is thanks to patents that ensure nobody is capable of doing so in the firs🎶t place? Judging by Tears of the Kingdom, perhaps more than previously thought.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild was very influential. It rewrote the open world rulebook pioneered by the likes of Far Cry and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Grand Theft Auto while simultaneously updating the Zelda formula for the modern era. While it took a few years, games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Genshin Impact and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Immortals Fenyx Rising were blatant clones, right down from their combat, traversal, and stamina mechanics that all sought to replicate what Nintendo did so well. None of them managed it, and most of the titles that drew from its brilliance we remember are those not afraid to innovate on what came before. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring is a masterpi🐓ece for that exact reason - it did more than just i𒈔mitate.
Over the weekend I found myself diving into the that surfaced several months ago, and they make far more sense now we have the full game context. Most of them detail mechanics like Ascend, Ultrahand, or Link dropping from the sky and firing arrows while moving in slow motion. Some of these features are unique, while others seem more rudimentary and common in the lexicon of open world games. Patenting them for this specific purpose not only feels suspicio🍌us, but legally aggressive.
Nintendo is potentially shutting away mechanical ideas I’d love to see other games use, even if not in the same way. Regardless, Tears of the Kingdom isn’t entirely original in what it does either. When Link shoots himself out of a Lookout Tower into the sky it’s a dead ringer for Ariana Grande yeeting herself out of the battle bus in Fortnite. Plenty of games 🔜slow down time when firing arrows.
Link can speed up his trajectory into a dive or slow down to take in his surroundings, always having the choice to deploy his paraglider whether close to the ground or not. Having places to land and positional awareness isn’t unique to ൩Zelda either, even if it puts them to use in a more creative way than we’ve seen other open world games employ.
To have this cemented in a patent and claim it’s bespoke and unable to be replicated is nonsense. The same goes for a power like Ultrahand or Ascend. Yes, Tears of the Kingdom provides us with a tangible level of freedom few other games can match, but the act of building things and passing through a piece of geometry isn’t a ne🌃w concept in itself, Nintendo just turned it into something special. You should see what kids build in Minecraft and Roblox these days.
Building things in games has been present for decades, and just because Nintendo has now decided it’s the future and this creativity should apply directly to the surrounding environment does not mean it has permission to lock it away. Recall too, which despite the fancy name is a power that manipulates time in ways the player can fully dictate. Nothing more, nothing less, but here we have mult🍨iple patent images which seem to depict puzzles found across shrines and the open world we’ve all been solving gleefully over the past week.
The joyful whimsy of Tears of the Kingdom is brought into context when you see that beneath the fancy presentation sits a bunch of lawyers and engineers drawing up diagrams primarily designed to limit future competition. Actually enforcing this in a cou💟rt of law is reportedly very difficult, and you’d have to be fairly blatant in your copycat intentions to have Nintendo brass knocking at your door. Patents are for ideas and functionality on a mechanical level, so from what I can tell Nintendo is essentially claiming it came up with these ideas and nobody else did. You co♛uld argue that’s the case, but to me it is far more akin to creative innovation than inventing fire for the first time.
Nintendo doesn’t want its own ideas used against it in a legal predicament, and thus it covers its back. Yet it also restricts, and doesn’t eliminate the smalไl yet entirely possible chance of someone building on Tears of the Kingdom and finding themselves in hot water. Only time will tell, and in an industry that continues to restrict itself through live service titles and corporate acquisitions, we should be welcoming the spread of innovation instead of restricting it.
