Earlier this year, an Elden Ring player with the handle Let Me Solo Her, real name Klein Tsuboi, made a name for himself by defeating difficult, but optional boss Malenia 1000 times. He made it a point to provide a service to other players, waiting by Malenia’s stage for the opportunity to beat her again and again for other players.
Today, Sony has revealed a patent that will allow you to do this for any game on their platform.
Patent disclosure is a matter of legal requirement, and in this patent application, two PlayStation account users can interact so that one user asks the other person for help, and then the other person gets to jump in at a predetermined point. While games like Elden Ring put certain limitations on how you can do such interactions in their worlds, for this patent the PlayStation console will create snapshots which is where the users can jump in. If you dabble in video game emulation, on your own or using commercially released emulators for old video games, this snapshot feature is the same as how save states work on emulators.
Implicit in the patent application is that this mechanic can be abused in such a way that players won’t even have to try very hard. As long as they can find people who will play the game’s hard parts for them, they could spend their time exploring the easier parts of the game and just getting the rewards of passing levels without having to work for it.
And, truthfully, that sounds great. That sounds like something a family could set up so that a parent or other relatives can play through a game for their younger children. It could also be something that friends, family, or medical professionals can set up for disabled players, so that they can also gain some level of access to video games that currently doesn’t exist. And maybe it will let some people just play their games without trying, because they have friends that are willing to do the hard work for them. And that would be fine too.
This patent may not lead to anything that we would actually see eventually implemented. But if you think about it, this is the virtual or online version of passing a controller over to someone else so they can play it for you. If this pushes through to be a gameplay feature, that other companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, and Valve also adopt, that would mean a real change in how we think about playing games.
Sony does already offer something very similar for their consoles today. Partly inspired by Valve’s Family Sharing feature, Sony lets two PlayStation owners use the same games on the same account. To do this, one PlayStation is designated as the primary PlayStation, and then other PlayStations get to share that account. Furthermore, Sony has a Share Play feature. Share Play allows users to join a game for a local multiplayer session, even if that game doesn’t have online multiplayer. Share Play also allows users to let other users view the game they are playing on their PlayStation console. Beyond that, the person sharing their screen can also let one of the remote viewers take over the game, by delegating control to them.
So this feature may sound farfetched on paper, but Sony has already enabled amazing things on their system, that only friends who have PlayStations would have experienced. Don’t be surprised if this actually ends up being something you can do on your PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 in the near future.
Source: GameRant
