This needs to be killed as we have prior art (Emulators, Braid, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, heaps of racing games, etc).
If their only significant addition is “we a have a button for it” then we need to ask if a button qualifies as “inventive” in 2024?
Edit:
Announcer: Will he succumb to the maddening urge to eradicate history? At the MERE PUSH of a SINGLE BUTTON! The beeyootiful shiny button! The jolly candy-like button! Will he hold out, folks? CAN he hold out?
On all those games my keyboard has a button for it.
All patents need to be killed. They only benefit the rich and powerful.
This breaks many games
Breaks trophies too, unless Sony disables them when it’s used.
In emulation if you are using retroachievements rewinding / save stating gives you a ‘lesser’ achievement so the precedent is there from the groups that already invented such a thing
Doesn’t seem like a good sell if they do it that way, though. Let’s invest money and time into this feature that we will disincentivise people from doing by reducing their rewards if they use it.
Works for people doing these things as a hobby project and accounting for functionality that currently exists, but not great for a corporation that would need to convince devs to implement the feature into their games and design around it.
It doesn’t need anyone to convince devs to implement it. I can do it whenever I run an emulator of old console games already, and devs of those games never implemented it.
If Sony wants to add it as a hardware feature they can.
As far as the patent, hopefully it’ll get denied but I doubt it. Once they have it it’ll cost someone time and money to challenge it, even though it should be a slam dunk that it is neither a new idea nor innovative and novel. This is how a lot of these egregious parents continue to stand - the cost of challenging them is high, especially if some blistering idiot of a judge ruled in a farcical manner.
It definitely will. Too many games are no longer 100% offline or small enough to load it all to RAM. Even for games that can be taken offline to play, it would mean the feature would only be able to work in “offline mode” or the developers would need to find some way to align it with the design of their other systems.
Or more likely, as with other features Sony uses as selling points like their recently discontinued “Resume Activity” cards, it remains optional and no developers opt to implement it because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Imagine just rewinding in Elden Ring? No more consequence for death, just un-lose your souls and dodge better without actually learning the tells.
What would be the point?
Let them ruin their own experience? Or it’ll make Elden Ring much more accessible to casual players.
Would be better to watch a Let’s Play, in my opinion. I don’t know why someone would want to play a game only to engage with none of its core gameplay features.
That is engaging with them, just in a way that they’d like to engage with them. From the time they bought the game, it ought to be theirs to do with as they like.
I mean, sure, they have the right, insomuch as someone can buy a game on disc and use it as a coaster I guess. But it ruins the point of it, in my opinion.
I’m not saying people are wrong to enjoy media and spend money however they want, but it’s like a concert venue installing fancy couches to put in the lobby for people who buy tickets to a show but don’t want to actually watch it. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
There are multiple things to get out of Elden Ring besides a challenge, and as further proof of that, the DLC retained the challenge but not some of the other fine points I really enjoyed about the base game.
People have been save scumming games for as long as saving has been available. A number of PC games have had instant save/load at any point for decades. This wouldn’t be much different
Sony patents random stuff just in case all the time. It doesn’t mean it’s ever going into a an actual product.
Is a crappy situation but patents don’t enable the patent holder to make a product, after all you can make the product without claiming a patent. Instead they stop people who are not the patent holder from making that product.
So if we put on our tinfoil hats its likely that some “just in case” patents are really just stopping their competition from heading in that direction.
Their lack of a patent for controller vibration prevented Sony from having vibration on Sixaxis - notice that despite all the BS that it interfered with motion sensing, Dualshock 3 came out just a few months after Sony managed to settle the suite with Immersion.
Since there’s no penalty for making a patent and not using it, it’s probably cheaper for Sony to pre-emptively register everything that comes from brainstorming sessions.
A great example, immersion held a patent and blocked the competition.
However if Sony (or anyone else) had developed and released a product (or even published a design) using the same technical implementation before 1996 then that would have established prior art and no one would be able to patent it.
They invented a quick save button?
This is designed to work with all games so it’s more similar to how many emulators implement quick save than how it works in most games. I suspect or rather hope that it’s as fast (instantaneous) as it is in emulators.
It also appears that it’s supposed to rewind like you can do in some racing games.
It’s more complicated than a simple quick save button found in mostly older games. It’s a neat feature but I would obviously prefer that they didn’t get the patent so Xbox also could implement something similar.
Yes but this time, it has quick load too!
Sounds like something only a small number of devs would implement. Unless they are confident they can fuck with the memory space of all games without issues. I expect a PS5 game is a bit more complicated than a saved state on an SNES.
Right?
We’re already capable of snapshotting memory state, I suppose this is just the next step of that. Maybe writing to a memory buffer etc
Pretty sure that’s already been done in Viewfinder
