Unlike the vast majority of its kombatants, Mortal Kombat is immortal. 23 years after its first outing, the franchise is still going strong, and thanks to some online innovations implemented by NetherRealm Studios, the newest game plans to stay alive far longer than any of it’s ill-fated kharacters…
Onthe eve of Mortal Kombat X’s launch, we caught up with game designer Derek Kirtzic to talk about how NetherRealm plans to keep the game’s heart ticking over, long after fans have taken off the head…
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NetherRealm has also included the Living Towers, something that intends to keep the game alive past it’s shelf life; where did that idea come from?
Well, for us, the Living Towers are a great way for people that just want to play single-player content invested in our game – we have an Hourly Tower that has a single modifier that gets more and more intense the more you climb the tower, we have a Daily Tower that switches every 24 hours and will feature pure chaos with its modifiers and traditional challenges and permutations, and then there’s the Premier Towers – these are more themed towards holidays or trying out new DLC. With every DLC release, you’ll download a ‘kompatability’ pack that gives you all the character information in that pack, so the Premier Towers let you try characters you might not want to buy straight away. The Premier Towers also feature little nuggets of lore, so all the hardcore MK nuts have got something to give fanfare to, you know?
It’s an interesting try-before-you-buy policy with DLC that you don’t see a lot of studios adopting.
Yeah, exactly – you see a lot of people saying ‘Um, I dunno, Jason X – for example – looks cool but I don’t know if I want to play him’. So you try a Tower for free and try all three of his variations and then you can decide, [there’s] no pressure.
Is it difficult talking about DLC in the current industry’s space, and getting it from the studio into the hands of the players?
I mean, I guess so, but I think with Mortal Kombat X, we really nailed it. We’ve got two extremely iconic guest characters first – Predator and Jason Vorhees – paired with two fan-service characters in Tremor and Tanya. Like, on our side of the fence, all we’ve heard from fans is ‘Tremor, Tremor, Tremor!’ you know? People have written petitions – and we love to listen to our fans, so we chose to bring him to life. I mean, he was in Mortal Kombat Vita and a bit in Mortal Kombat Special Forces, but with this DLC, we’ve made him a real character, [we’ve] really given him his own personality.
How long do you plan to support the game post-launch?
We plan on getting the characters out as fast as we can, that’s something that’s really important to us. None of the characters are on-disc right now, I can tell you that: I read messages on forums saying we’re just trying to cash in on them, and all I can say to that is ‘We are absolutely not’. Those characters are still in development, a majority of them will be out before EVO – [after all,] we want to see what people can do with them! – and we’re at the studio crunching hard because we want to see these characters out there as much as the fans do.
How quickly can you adjust balancing issues in the game if you realise a character is over-powered somewhere?
Well, there was something we introduced into Injustice called the ‘tweak [variables]’, which is basically a series of knobs behind-the-scenes that allow us to adjust just damage, break frames, cancel frames [and so on]. We can mess with all that without having to put out a patch – behind the Injustice scenes, we were always looking at forums, watching combo videos… We didn’t want anything to be broken; we could fix it on the fly.
So that must surely tie into the frame data you display in the Pause Menu, then, too?
Absolutely, and we like having that there because it’s like a built-in strategy guide or tutorial for new players, while the veterans can look at it and go ‘hmm, OK, I can do this, this, this and this’ straight away. These values will change depending on what we did on the back-end, too, so you’ll always know what your moves are doing technically as well as [visually].
We celebrate other masters of the fighting genre with our Ultimate Fighter Showdown [Turbo Edition], available to download now
