Get Over Here! – Mortal Kombat Hits Xbox Live Hard
Posted April 19, 2011 by Keadin
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This week sees the launch of a brand new start for the Mortal Kombat series on Xbox 360. The team at Netherrealm Studios has given the franchise a complete reboot and is bringing Sub Zero, Scorpion and the rest of the classic characters back for an all-new bloodbath. With fine-tuned mechanics for Xbox LIVE, a bevy of challenge modes, and some of the most cringe-inducing power moves it's safe to say that Mortal Kombat is back in a big way.
Adam Urbano, the game's producer, was available to answer some questions about the game and give us some insight in to developing a reboot for a series with almost 10 years of history.
Fighting games have recently resurged in popularity, almost to their height in the days of arcades. Is there something about the modern gaming landscape that's contributing to this?
In many ways I see the resurgence of the fighting genre as an extension of the massive popularity of Xbox Live Arcade. The nice thing about fighting games is that they're really easy to just pick up and play with some friends for 10 minutes, whereas many other genres can require substantial time commitments for a single session. Mortal Kombat really does have the best of both worlds in that there is a ton of content to explore and unlock for when someone has free time, but the core mechanics are still quick, arcade-like fun.
Our engine was literally built around blood and gore. We spent years focusing on what we call "goretech", which are some pretty amazing engine upgrades specifically built to let us showcase the capabilities of the modern hardware. All of our characters are built with a full skin, skeleton, muscle system, and a set of organs, which allow us to have our really gory X-ray moves and fatalities. The characters skin and cloth will rip and tear during a fight. We also run a full physics simulation on all of the blood, so you'll see blood flying off of characters and hitting the opponent and the ground in an extremely realistic fashion.
The MK roster of characters has grown and grown (some would say overgrown) over the years, allowing fans to find characters they really identify with. With so many options available, how do you decide who makes the cut in this game?
With this Mortal Kombat being a reboot of the series the decisions were very easy to make in terms of the roster. We basically took all the characters people love from the arcade games and updated them for a new generation of players. The real challenge, which the artists and designers did an incredible job at, was updating the characters while still capturing the essence that fans have become so attached to.
Modern graphics hardware obviously gives the artists a chance to include detail that was unheard of back in the arcade days. It really shows in the final game, making even perennial fan favorites like Scorpion and Sub Zero feel totally fresh.
The goal from day one was to make the game accessible, but with many layers of depth making it a truly tournament-worthy fighting game; our inclusion at EVO as well as the upcoming PDP Mortal Kombat tournament in Las Vegas are some good early signs that we've achieved our goal. We have technology that will allow us to further balance the game on-the-fly if we ever need to in order to ensure it is perfectly balanced for tournament play.
You've added the new X-ray system that adds counters and super moves. How has this altered the traditional MK playstyle?
It is tough to isolate the X-ray system's impact on the playstyle since we built a whole new fight engine from the ground up for this Mortal Kombat. I know that players who may not have played an MK game since the arcade days are especially going to be blown away. There is just so much that goes into each fight; unique fighting styles of each character, the huge array of combos, the enhanced attacks for almost every move in the game, the tag swaps and tag assists.
The X-ray system is just a another piece to the depth of the game and is really based around the mental game between you and an opponent balancing the pros and cons of using your super meter for the "big hit" of an X-ray attack or taking advantage of the meter for enhanced attacks or combo breakers.
Imagine coming to work and seeing severed spines and intestines on people's monitors every single day for years. You'd be amazed how quickly one becomes desensitized to stuff that would normally be therapy-inducing. That said, to this day I shudder every single time I see the fatality where Liu Kang throws his hat into the ground and uses it like a band saw… every single time…