Have you ever desired to go back and replay a section of a game? Sometimes, you’ll regret a choice made or feel like some of the precious resources gathered were wasted. You might be in luck if you ever wanted to rewind your game and start from a specific point. At least, you might be in luck if Sony opts to go through with a new patent. It’s an exciting feature if this comes to fruition, but being that this is just a patent, it’s impossible to say that we’ll actually ever see this feature become a reality.
Thanks to Insider Gaming, we’re finding out that a new patent from Sony has appeared online. With the patent, it looks like Sony wants to offer a means for players to rewind their gameplay campaigns. How it works is that players can progress through the game with the data of their playthrough being saved. If you decide there’s a section you want to go back and start, then this feature will be accessible. Essentially, players can rewind their gameplay and find a moment in the playthrough that they want to resume.
That should allow for an easier means to go back and see how certain changes would have been made or give you another chance at a fight. There are all kinds of different scenarios in which we could see this patent feature being useful. This is especially true if you’re able to go back to specific points in the game rather than being limited to replaying a whole chapter. Of course, the publication we’ve found this patent reveal from also makes an excellent point. There’s nothing here to suggest where Sony would store this information.
It could be quite a massive data load for Sony’s servers to sift through if it’s not something that is stored locally. The point that this patent references streaming suggests that this is not accessible offline or locally. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that this is also just a patent. We don’t know if this is something that will ever see the light of day. Most often, patents are just filled with ideas that a company has but not necessarily a document revealing a feature or hardware release is actually coming out. So, for now, we’ll just have to wait and see if something comes of this patent. On paper, it does sound like a rather useful feature.
