Sony patent wants toadd flexibility to your gaming experience (Picture: Sony)
You might soon be able to go back into a PlayStation 5 game and play from anywhere, according to a new Sony patent.
Sony has filed a patent for a feature that could make replaying favourite moments in a video game a lot easier, allowing you to jump into a specific point of a single-player campaign from the dashboard.
Registering new patents is common for publishers, even if they never end up using them, and it’s not long ago Sony patented a feature that warns you if your posture is bad.
This new one seems a bit more practical though, in that it will allow you to re-enter a game at any point, to replay a favourite set piece or level.
The patent is named ‘Content streaming with gameplay launch’ and explains that Sony wants to add lots of ‘trigger points’ throughout a game’s campaign, allowing players to drop in where they want while watching gameplay.
This would mean that you wouldn’t have to start a new campaign to experience a certain moment again, as the patent states:
‘A system and method for launching gameplay from streaming content is provided. […] The media content may be streamed to a user device over a communication network. A selection of one of the at least one or more trigger points may be received over the communication network from the user device.
‘Identifying the set of game data associated with the selected trigger point may be identified and the interactive title for gameplay may be launched by the user device based on the identified set of game data associated with the selected trigger point.’
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Why it only mentions streaming games is a bit of a mystery, as this sounds like it would be useful for any normal game, especially as it seems very much in line with the existing PlayStation 5 feature Activities – which lets you start missions from your dashboard.
Of course, like any patent, there’s no guarantee that Sony will use this technology, but now that they mention it, it is frustrating that there’s no video game equivalent to chapter skips in a movie.
Unless you create and keep a save point manually, or the game happens to have level selects, it’s often very difficult to replay a favourite moment without restarting the game from scratch.
Sony patent drawing showing how we could jump into the action again (Picture: Sony)
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Sony is planning a new system wide feature that will make replaying your favourite video game moments a lot easier.