A Blissful Ass
07-13-2010, 01:49 PM
We play the new Mortal Kombat and have a chat with series co-creator Ed Boon.
Welcome back to the golden age of Mortal Kombat. Taking its cues from the first three classic Mortal Kombat games, the new title is at once a homage to the earliest games in the series, but also progressive in just the right places. The team listened to what the fans were asking for, in short, and is set to deliver a memorable new entry.
We're talking brutal fights with ridiculously over-the-top fatalities, classic characters and stages, and game mechanics that look and feel like Mortal Kombat, but are more varied and a whole lot less canned.
We're also talking about a new take on the series' story. "Mortal Kombat has this timeline - eighteen years of making games, and we really didn't want to just continue, like, chapter seventeen of the whole story," says Ed Boon, the co-creator of the series. "So we're kind of doing a Back to the Future type of thing, where Raiden is about to be killed by Shao Kahn, and just before he delivers the last blow, he sends a mental message to his earlier self, so the camera rewinds back to Mortal Kombat 1. The Raiden from back then gets a message and he doesn't know what's going on, but he knows something bad's going to happen, and the game spans Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3, retelling the story with an enlightened Raiden, and he's changing the course of things, so everything you've seen happen before – Liu Kang winning, the guys turning into cybernetic ninjas, are changed around, so you might see a character become cybernetic who wasn't before, and so you see a different version [of events]."
While the game is still fast, it has a weight and impact that makes every hit all the more gratifying, and while plenty of the moves will be familiar – it wouldn't be Mortal Kombat without Sub Zero freezing dudes for instance – the new combo system, the new mechanics and the ever-inventive fatalities mean every bout feels fresh.
"The fundamental fighting mechanics are based on custom combos," says Ed Boon, the co-creator of the series. "We want to do as little of the pre-programmed combos in the game as possible, and let players take pieces A, B and C and piece them together themselves. And when you add the whole tag team thing, with other characters coming in, all of a sudden there's new variables to mess with. We just want to create this huge palette and let players connect the dots. And that's our mission, with every single feature in the game, the X-Ray moves, all the specials and enhanced specials, they're all built around just adding variables to what the player has to work with."
Powering the gameplay system is a Super meter that functions much as you'd expect. It's a three segment bar, and different moves use different numbers of segments. An enhanced special, for instance, uses a single segment. Enhancing a super basically gives it more oomph. Reptile's slimy green projectile gets much larger, while Kung Lao's spinning hat changes from horizontal to vertical, embedding itself in his opponent's chest.
The Super bar also ties into tag team. In tag team games you can instantly swap with a partner, or you can tag them in to assist with an attack. You can do the former at any time, but the latter will cost you a segment. This stops people from abusing the system, but still leaves things open for crazy tag combos.
Of course, the real jewel in the crown of the Super system is that when it's full you have the chance to do an 'X-Ray attack' (this may not be the final name by the way – it's mostly descriptive at this point), where your character does a sequence of devastating slow motion punches and/or kicks, and the impacts are shown in x-ray vision. Y'know, so you can see the bones shatter.
The Super meter also helps players turn the tide of a battle. Sure, it builds whenever you do a special move, but it also builds when you take damage. So the more you're getting wailed on, the quicker you'll be able to respond with an X-Ray move.
It all adds up to a fast-paced, flashy game with insane combo potential. Playing as a character like Sektor, it's entirely possible to do sequences of teleport uppercuts, keeping the enemy in the air until launching into an X-Ray attack. In short, the game feels good.
Mortal Kombat runs on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 3, and the action sits at a silky smooth 60 frames per second. Characters are huge and detailed, the animations flow really well, and the stages are quite spectacular. We particularly like the Coliseum-style arena, where a huge crowd of people are cheering from the stands, and a demonic figure surveys the fight from a throne formed from a massive horned skull.
There are plenty of small touches that show the team is going the extra yards. For instance, yes there's lots of blood, but this blood actually has a physical presence in the world, spraying onto characters and bloodying them up. It's a small touch, but we like. Characters also take damage, so even if you win, chances are one of your eyes will be popping out of your head or your jaw will be smashed off.
And then there's the internal modeling. Yes, the team have modeled each character's insides for the X-Ray attacks, and the result looks great. Because hey, when Johnny Cage goes to town on an opponent's bathing suit area (an actual move), or Sub Zero reaches into an enemy's chest to freeze then shatter their liver (also an actual move – bless this game), you want their insides to look their best.
So just who is going to be in this roster? "Our approach to the characters is that we're really focusing on Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3 in terms of the roster," Ed tells us. "So for the most part if you have a favorite character from those games, you're probably going to see him in the game." Sadly, they're not announcing any new characters – they want fans to be taken by surprise.
Ed is happy to talk about online, however. "We have very aggressive plans for online. First of all there's the downloadable content. That's a big part of it - we really want to continue to support the game after it comes out with new characters, new backgrounds, new fatalities. In terms of actual play you can obviously do the one on one combat quick match, but the really big thing we're trying to do is encourage community play, where we get eight people together, they're all playing, everybody can participate and comment, and winner stays, loser pays – we really want to simulate that and create what a lot of people remember from their arcade game experience." How about leader boards, or perhaps replays of the highest combos? "Yeah, everything to promote who's the best at this game."
Fittingly, we've left discussion of the fatalities to last. They're a huge part of the series, and they're back in a big way in Mortal Kombat, with both stage-based finishers, like being impaled on spikes in The Pit (complete with oozing blood and a skewered liver), and standalone fatalities. A few that stood out – Mileena ripping the head off Nightwolf then drinking blood from it, Sektor firing off multiple rockets at Kung Lao who explodes into several big chunks, which are then each targeted by rockets leaving little but a fine red mist, and Scorpion slicing Cage at the waist then neck, leaving him still standing, before kicking out his mid-section. So good.
But what about Babalities and the like? "Certainly this Mortal Kombat game we're taking a little bit more seriously, so we're probably not going to have a friendship move and whatnot," says Ed, "but if we were to do something like that we're definitely not going to document it. That's what I think was part of the fun of the old games. 'You turned the guy into a baby!' What? Or, 'you pulled out a rainbow'! What the? It's such an odd thing. We really want these events – if they happen – to be almost rumors. That's a big part of what Mortal Kombat was. The question mark about - what else is in this game?"
IGN
So i was wrong Mortal Kombat isn't dead
Welcome back to the golden age of Mortal Kombat. Taking its cues from the first three classic Mortal Kombat games, the new title is at once a homage to the earliest games in the series, but also progressive in just the right places. The team listened to what the fans were asking for, in short, and is set to deliver a memorable new entry.
We're talking brutal fights with ridiculously over-the-top fatalities, classic characters and stages, and game mechanics that look and feel like Mortal Kombat, but are more varied and a whole lot less canned.
We're also talking about a new take on the series' story. "Mortal Kombat has this timeline - eighteen years of making games, and we really didn't want to just continue, like, chapter seventeen of the whole story," says Ed Boon, the co-creator of the series. "So we're kind of doing a Back to the Future type of thing, where Raiden is about to be killed by Shao Kahn, and just before he delivers the last blow, he sends a mental message to his earlier self, so the camera rewinds back to Mortal Kombat 1. The Raiden from back then gets a message and he doesn't know what's going on, but he knows something bad's going to happen, and the game spans Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3, retelling the story with an enlightened Raiden, and he's changing the course of things, so everything you've seen happen before – Liu Kang winning, the guys turning into cybernetic ninjas, are changed around, so you might see a character become cybernetic who wasn't before, and so you see a different version [of events]."
While the game is still fast, it has a weight and impact that makes every hit all the more gratifying, and while plenty of the moves will be familiar – it wouldn't be Mortal Kombat without Sub Zero freezing dudes for instance – the new combo system, the new mechanics and the ever-inventive fatalities mean every bout feels fresh.
"The fundamental fighting mechanics are based on custom combos," says Ed Boon, the co-creator of the series. "We want to do as little of the pre-programmed combos in the game as possible, and let players take pieces A, B and C and piece them together themselves. And when you add the whole tag team thing, with other characters coming in, all of a sudden there's new variables to mess with. We just want to create this huge palette and let players connect the dots. And that's our mission, with every single feature in the game, the X-Ray moves, all the specials and enhanced specials, they're all built around just adding variables to what the player has to work with."
Powering the gameplay system is a Super meter that functions much as you'd expect. It's a three segment bar, and different moves use different numbers of segments. An enhanced special, for instance, uses a single segment. Enhancing a super basically gives it more oomph. Reptile's slimy green projectile gets much larger, while Kung Lao's spinning hat changes from horizontal to vertical, embedding itself in his opponent's chest.
The Super bar also ties into tag team. In tag team games you can instantly swap with a partner, or you can tag them in to assist with an attack. You can do the former at any time, but the latter will cost you a segment. This stops people from abusing the system, but still leaves things open for crazy tag combos.
Of course, the real jewel in the crown of the Super system is that when it's full you have the chance to do an 'X-Ray attack' (this may not be the final name by the way – it's mostly descriptive at this point), where your character does a sequence of devastating slow motion punches and/or kicks, and the impacts are shown in x-ray vision. Y'know, so you can see the bones shatter.
The Super meter also helps players turn the tide of a battle. Sure, it builds whenever you do a special move, but it also builds when you take damage. So the more you're getting wailed on, the quicker you'll be able to respond with an X-Ray move.
It all adds up to a fast-paced, flashy game with insane combo potential. Playing as a character like Sektor, it's entirely possible to do sequences of teleport uppercuts, keeping the enemy in the air until launching into an X-Ray attack. In short, the game feels good.
Mortal Kombat runs on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine 3, and the action sits at a silky smooth 60 frames per second. Characters are huge and detailed, the animations flow really well, and the stages are quite spectacular. We particularly like the Coliseum-style arena, where a huge crowd of people are cheering from the stands, and a demonic figure surveys the fight from a throne formed from a massive horned skull.
There are plenty of small touches that show the team is going the extra yards. For instance, yes there's lots of blood, but this blood actually has a physical presence in the world, spraying onto characters and bloodying them up. It's a small touch, but we like. Characters also take damage, so even if you win, chances are one of your eyes will be popping out of your head or your jaw will be smashed off.
And then there's the internal modeling. Yes, the team have modeled each character's insides for the X-Ray attacks, and the result looks great. Because hey, when Johnny Cage goes to town on an opponent's bathing suit area (an actual move), or Sub Zero reaches into an enemy's chest to freeze then shatter their liver (also an actual move – bless this game), you want their insides to look their best.
So just who is going to be in this roster? "Our approach to the characters is that we're really focusing on Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3 in terms of the roster," Ed tells us. "So for the most part if you have a favorite character from those games, you're probably going to see him in the game." Sadly, they're not announcing any new characters – they want fans to be taken by surprise.
Ed is happy to talk about online, however. "We have very aggressive plans for online. First of all there's the downloadable content. That's a big part of it - we really want to continue to support the game after it comes out with new characters, new backgrounds, new fatalities. In terms of actual play you can obviously do the one on one combat quick match, but the really big thing we're trying to do is encourage community play, where we get eight people together, they're all playing, everybody can participate and comment, and winner stays, loser pays – we really want to simulate that and create what a lot of people remember from their arcade game experience." How about leader boards, or perhaps replays of the highest combos? "Yeah, everything to promote who's the best at this game."
Fittingly, we've left discussion of the fatalities to last. They're a huge part of the series, and they're back in a big way in Mortal Kombat, with both stage-based finishers, like being impaled on spikes in The Pit (complete with oozing blood and a skewered liver), and standalone fatalities. A few that stood out – Mileena ripping the head off Nightwolf then drinking blood from it, Sektor firing off multiple rockets at Kung Lao who explodes into several big chunks, which are then each targeted by rockets leaving little but a fine red mist, and Scorpion slicing Cage at the waist then neck, leaving him still standing, before kicking out his mid-section. So good.
But what about Babalities and the like? "Certainly this Mortal Kombat game we're taking a little bit more seriously, so we're probably not going to have a friendship move and whatnot," says Ed, "but if we were to do something like that we're definitely not going to document it. That's what I think was part of the fun of the old games. 'You turned the guy into a baby!' What? Or, 'you pulled out a rainbow'! What the? It's such an odd thing. We really want these events – if they happen – to be almost rumors. That's a big part of what Mortal Kombat was. The question mark about - what else is in this game?"
IGN
So i was wrong Mortal Kombat isn't dead