‘Tears Of The Kingdom’ loading screens among Nintendo’s newest patents

Nintendo registered a score of patents in the past month and almost all of them are features, loading screens and mechanics from The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom.

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Automaton Media reported that 31 of the 32 patents publicised between July 10 and August 2 were related to Tears Of The Kingdom. One patent pertained to Ultrahand and its ability to prevent the player from selecting the object that they might be standing on. It explained how Ultrahand also won’t work on objects that are connected to the thing that Link is standing on either.

Another patent referred to the way that the player interacts with objects that Link rides across the game world. When Link is stood on a moving object, the character will move in the same direction as the object and at the same speed, irrespective of player input on their Switch.

“When the player’s character and a dynamic object come in contact in the 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’s character,” read the patent for this mechanic.

Though this might sound the same as any other game that features movement, Nintendo’s solution does not use physics to make Link move in the vector of the object.

The loading screens between the player choosing to fast travel and landing at the location selected have been registered too. Nintendo described this as “a game processing method capable of enriching game presentation during a waiting period in which at least part of the game processing is interrupted”.

Lastly, Nintendo is hoping that its footprint mode for the Tears Of The Kingdom map is patented. This lets players discover areas of the world that they haven’t travelled to yet by visualising their journey on the in-game map.

In other gaming news, Diablo 4 is no longer a titan on Twitch, seeing a significant drop in its peak viewership from June to August.

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