Mortal Kombat won't need patches for character balancing

[Guild McCommunist]

If NetherRealms Studio's post-launch plans work out for the upcoming new Mortal Kombat, players won't have to worry much about balance issues wrecking online competition. Speaking to Kotaku at GamesCom, series co-creator Ed Boon explained how they're building the game to allow for easy balance tweaking after release.

"Everybody wants to ship the perfectly balanced game, but when it has been played for six months and beat on by everybody, players are going to find its weaknesses," Boon said. "We're actually putting stuff in the game that lets us 'turn knobs' after the [game ships]. We have knobs that we can turn to further tweak the game once we know everyone has been bashing on it."

As such, Boon says it won't require a full patch in order for them to tweak small components of the game, although the system will have its limits. "I mean, we can't add a special move, but we can slow a projectile down or speed a projectile up or tweak the damage, just to kind of fine tune it after the fact," Boon explained.

Boon also talked a bit about their plans for downloadable content, calling it "a great opportunity for either a brand new character that nobody's ever seen before or bringing back a character that was in MK4 or later" (they're building the initial on-disc roster out of characters from Mortal Kombat 1-3).

Thankfully, Boon also made clear that any new characters will actually be new, in that they won't do the widely reviled tactic of releasing locked code on the disc, and simply selling DLC that actually acts as a "key" that only unlocks that code. "They're not going to be on the disc and you'll unlock it or something," Boon said. "You'll actually download the data."

And lastly, Boon also said they're "definitely considering" a PC version of Mortal Kombat as well. "Apparently there seems to be a market for that in Europe. Since we're on the Unreal Engine, I guess it's not that much of a change from the console versions."

For now, though, Mortal Kombat is only planned for release on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 next year. [/p]

Source

Not major news but I mainly did it to test out the new formatting. Kudos to SonicSlasher!

I think Monday Night Combat implemented the same sort of thing. Seeing as, like any fighting game, there will be a lot of character balancing issues from the get-go, it's nice to see they've taken the liberty of having such an easy way to change balance. This new Mortal Kombat really feels like the reboot the franchise needs anyway.

 

[Rayder]

I just hope this new MK will have a more intuitive fighting engine. For me, MK only really had the gore factor going for it, the fighting itself was very stiff compared to fighters like Tekken or SF.

Personally, I found it quite depressing that MK is the only REAL fighting game on DS. Don't tell me about those cartoon fighters on DS, they are all quite simple compared to real fighting games. I could just never get into MK's fighting engine. Using a button to block is never intuitive to me.

Now, I doubt they will change their tried-and-true mechanics (beyond the visuals), but it would be nice to be more like SF or Tekken to improve the flow of the battles and make the game more accessible to more gamers.

You gotta love how they tease a PC version....that just pisses me off, because you know that if a PC version ever materializes, it will be long after the point where anyone really cares anymore.

 

[GameDragon]

Personally, I found it quite depressing that MK is the only REAL fighting game on DS. Don't tell me about those cartoon fighters on DS, they are all quite simple compared to real fighting games.

You're right about that for the most part, but Bleach DS steps out of that boundary and has a fairly decent fighting system.

And I really doubt a PC version will ever come into existence, but who knows.

 

[Scott-105]

I want this game! I didn't even know a Mortal Kombat game was coming out. Hopefully it will be better than MK vs DC. I hated that game sooo much.

 

[Canonbeat234]

I want this game! I didn't even know a Mortal Kombat game was coming out. Hopefully it will be better than MK vs DC. I hated that game sooo much.

MK vs DC was an epic fail attempt to make a cross-over fighting game like SF vs Capcom. Those two different games were blanced to a degree. If someone can spam a certain move over and over again, that was the only gripe in MK vs DC well IMO that is...

 

[flo]

MK must return to that unique atmosphere and characters from the first 3 games . No more goofy -ness , no more experiments . You have a fan base, don't ruin it ,give them what they want .
PS : Kitana looks hot !

 

[Jamstruth]

I hope they include a Balance Changelog for this. It would just be weird to turn on the game and find that your character was now slower than you were expecting.

 

[superrob]

Sounds like something where the game pulls down the settings directly from their servers... sounds like something thats gonna get hacked (DNS cheat it to put in your own settings and get overpowered).

 

[SPH73]

Terrible series. Should have died out a long time ago. Actually the franchise did die a long time ago but they kept making the games anyways.