There’s nothing like a little bit of patent dialogue to get us Nintendo followers all excited, eh? Whereas the most recent authorized bagsy from the Huge N is not fairly as juicy because the potential {hardware} options we have seen in current weeks, it does communicate to a visible fashion that mixes the worlds of 3D and 2D — and no, that does not essentially imply HD-2D remakes are within the pipeline (thanks, Nintendo Wire).
Patent US 2025/0090952 was authorised within the US on twentieth March 2025 beneath the catchy little title ‘Non-Transitory Pc-Readable Storage Medium Having Recreation Program Saved Therein, Recreation System, Recreation Processing Technique, and Recreation Equipment’. That is mindless, we all know, however the central thrust of it describes a program that may render a 3D digital area in a manner that feels two-dimensional.
This goal is achieved by means of plenty of totally different steps, all of that are wrapped up within the near-incomprehensible authorized communicate that we have come to anticipate from patents. From what we will make out, a brand new strategy to shadows is the driving drive behind the visible fashion, with this system able to doing all kinds of fancy issues with Display screen House Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) to render block shadows on background objects. These seem to disregard the space between a participant character and the item it’s casting its shadow on, forming an phantasm the place the 3D area is ‘flattened’ however the impression of depth is maintained, “not solely the shadow but additionally the item itself could be rendered in a 2D method”.
This ‘flattening’ can also be seemingly utilized to the sprites themselves, with the patent stating that this system may “deform and render a predetermined object in order to make a standard vector thereof nearer to a route towards a place of the digital digital camera” — “regular vector,” on this occasion, being how the depth of the character interacts with lighting and shadows.
Naturally, the accompanying diagrams within the patent do little to elucidate particular situations the place this program could possibly be used, although we have heard rumblings on-line of individuals linking the described depth impressions and 2D/3D interplay to one thing much like Sq. Enix’s HD-2D visible fashion. The next tweet from YouTuber Mike Odyssey, for instance, muses on how the tech could possibly be used to revamp the 2D visuals of A Hyperlink to the Previous in a future remake.
Now, as a lot as we just like the considered seeing Nintendo classics like Tremendous Mario World, Tremendous Metroid and ALTTP introduced again in an HD-2D fashion, it looks like a little bit of a stretch to leap to that conclusion from this patent. The expertise described, to us, feels a lot nearer to one thing we have seen within the Paper Mario collection than any trace of a brand new remake fashion.
As identified by Nintendo Wire, it is also value allowing for that Nintendo has utilized for comparable patents previously (the identical title could be discovered on US filings from 2022 and 2023). These former purposes each include diagrams which seem way more in keeping with one thing like Paper Mario or Mario Kart Tour than the remake hypothesis.
However that is Nintendo! There is no assure when — or if — this patent will crop up in first-party software program, however we’ll actually be maintaining a tally of the shadows within the Change 2 line-up.
