Between July and August, Nintendo filed patents for a whopping 32 in-game technologies. Almost all of them, except for one, are associated with the company’s masterpiece The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
These patents cover Link’s capabilities like “Fuse,” “Ultrahand,” and “Recall,” however It has also been recorded For specific abilities such as Riju’s remote lightning attack.
Although this is just business as usual for Nintendo, as Most notably AutomatonSome of these patents could be considered “too aggressive” or “too generic”. The Japanese developer went so far as to record some basic ideas such as the game’s loading sequences, where the player uses fast travel to send a link to another location and the image of the starting point map changes to the destination map.
This seems to have the potential to enrich the game’s presentation during the waiting period:
“The way the game is processed is capable of enriching the game rendering during the waiting period in which at least part of the game’s processing is interrupted”
One of the other patents cited is the calculation of velocity when the game’s protagonist is bound on top of a “dynamic” object or vehicle. Here is part of the description of this solution:
“The movement of animated dynamic objects placed in virtual space is controlled by physics calculations, and the movement of the player character is controlled by user input. When the player character and dynamic object touch in a downward direction relative to the character (in other words, when the character is on top of an object), The movement of the dynamic object is added to the movement of the player character.”
As insightful as the descriptions are, these patents own them Some fans worry that the company may “stifle innovation” By registering simple mechanisms you are likely to ban other developers.
It’s worth noting how all of these patents seem to focus on existing gameplay mechanics in Tears of the Kingdom and don’t necessarily refer to any new content coming to the game in the future.
Back in March this year, Nintendo patented a Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom:
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