I assume that’s why WB was making these moves, instead of just letting it sit, but this is the AAA game industry, so you can never truly rule out petty nonsense
Monolith was playing pretty fast and loose with the LOTR mythos, right? They’ll probably invent some reason to bring Talion back, even though he’s super dead
That’s what patent lawyers try to exploit when they write software patents: software is by its nature kinda vague, but if you can tighten up the language of the algorithm, you have something that is both distinctly yours but also broad enough such that you can go to other companies playing in that space when they start to wander into your territory.
In this case, you’d probably be looking at something like “System And Method For Generating And Maintaining A Roster Of Artificial Intelligence Characters Based On User Input” or something like that (probably not that broad if it took them three tries), which would mean that any forthcoming title that has a cast of NPCs that can be altered primarily by user input (thinking a lot about roguelikes/roguelites or XCOM-style games here) would either have to be published by WB or would have to pay WB a licensing fee to use that system.
Patents in general are supposed to be a way of protecting innovation by small business, but corporate consolidation is such that most large companies will just eat the smaller ones for their patents and then use them as a legal cudgel against other companies.
I’m just going to make the Nemebro System and WB will just have to sit there and twiddle their thumbs
