In a new patent filed by Sony earlier this month, it was revealed that the tech titan plans to bring about a feature allowing users to cherry-pick exact moments from which they can replay a game. It’s a feature that would empower users to track back through a campaign and select a specific moment in time to change a decision, re-experience something epic, or recount their steps, without needing to replay entire chapters – or the whole game.
We Need To Go Back!
Titled ‘CONTENT STREAMING WITH GAMEPLAY LAUNCH’, the all-new patent shows the desired process through a series of handy sketches and diagrams. It’s shown that gameplay sequences would be split up into subchapters complete with ‘trigger points’ that players can select from, planting them in the heart of the specific scene they want to replay in a matter of seconds.
This will be a huge win for content creators, for example. Do you want to make a video showcasing how to defeat a particular boss? Well, with this new feature, you can jump straight to that fight without needing to tailor a save around it or playing the game up to that point – which might be several hours at least.
In the flow put forward in the Sony document (which was shared by exputer.com), it was revealed that it’ll work something like this:
- As the user plays their game, information regarding ‘media content’ will be stored, with trigger points being associated with ‘specific data sets’
- The user will have the opportunity to stream media content over ‘a communication work’ to their device
- These ‘trigger points’ will be offered to the player while they stream media, watching back through gameplay, which they’ll be able to select at will
- The system will identify ‘game data’ associated with said trigger points
- Based on the game data associated with the trigger points, the system will ‘launch the interactive title for gameplay by the user device based on the identified set of game data associated with the select trigger point
That means that, while watching gameplay, if you suddenly became enamoured and wanted to leap back in, you could – you would have the option to get straight back into the game from the point that you’re viewing.
There’s a lot of information up in the air, but it reads like an interesting enough concept on paper. I can’t help but see technical limitations to it, however. Is Sony saying that every user’s session will be backed up somewhere on some centralised server? If so, that’s tens of millions of playthroughs from thousands of different games — I can’t see that being a thing.
Also, there are references in the patent publishing history that connect this particular filing with other patents, some of which go as far back as 2019, so this has been on Sony’s to-do list for several years. It could be a case of them patenting it so nobody else claims the process.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
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