Xbox Addict

Mortal Kombat Won’t Need Patches for Online

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.