Mortal Kombat’s New DLC Plan
You guys are going to have to face it, DLC is the wave of the future for the fighting game genre. The new Mortal Kombat reboot is the next game that will make extensive use of downloadable capabilities. In fact, Mortal Kombat is going to be one of the first games that will produce downloadable content in real time, specifically through balance matches. Ed Boon, explained this idea in an interview with Kotaku:
The past few games, we’ve had some exploits that we thought, ‘We’d really like to fix that, … with the introduction of online, imbalances become very publicly exploited. You can fix them with patches — and every game has their really powerful characters, like Sagat in Street Fighter IV, … 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 … 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. 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.
In short, balance changes will be handled with patchless DLC, which is something that we have not yet seen in the fighting game world. However, there will be more massive DLC downloads including new characters and stages. Boom himself called their DLC strategy “aggressive” with plenty of new content planned for the future. He says that this will come in most handy when it comes to character roster. The roster, as it stands now, will be mostly comprised of Mortal Kombat 1, 2, and 3 characters. If they want to look beyond those games, they will have to enter the downloadable arena.
We know we’re going to be really aggressive with the DLC. That’s 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. That’s how we’re going to introduce more characters. They’re not going to be on the disc and you’ll unlock it or something. You’ll actually download the data. The big challenge is getting the DLC characters to people who didn’t buy them. We’re going to need a patch or some kind of delivery method—and we’re still trying to solve it. One option is a free character that everybody gets and get you all the purchasable ones too. If you download a free version of Raiden or whoever, you’ll get everything.
The dev team is also considering coming out with a PC version, although they have their doubts on how lucrative the market might be for a PC fighting game. At the very least, they said they wouldn’t have to do much work to convert it. Stay on the lookout for more Mortal Kombat info, as we push toward its release in 2011.
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