They’re all gonna die in Mortal Kombat X

I think 2015 is going to be a fine year for gaming. Sure, most of your favourite 2014 games were delayed into 2015, but I still stand by my statement. One game that I’m looking forward to? That new Hatsune Miku idol game that I’m importing from Japan. But until that arrives, Mortal Kombat X will be a very close second for me.

So, if you cast your mind back to the events of Mortal Kombat 9 (SPOILER ROUND ONE: FIGHT!), you’ll remember that EarthRealm had been left in dire straits. And I’m not talking about the band. Sindel had pulled off a perfect round of Unreal Tournament on various earth warrior faces, with a multi-kill streak that was only stopped by the intervention of Nightwolf and his spirit suicide bomb. Liu Kang dies, Shinnok is revealed to be the mastermind behind events, Earth is barely saved and only a few kombatants survive, including Sonya and Johnny Cage. And twenty years later, that’s where Mortal Kombat X kicks off.

“At the beginning of the game we do one of those ‘Hey, remember what happened and then jump to the future” kind of moments,” executive producer Shaun Himmerick said to Game Informer.

A lot of people die. I always joke that I think one of the reasons Ed wanted to do Quan Chi is because he’s the guy from Hell who can resurrect people, but they are not always the same. Quan Chi obviously lets us do that. The nice thing: We have a whole new generation of people to play with, not just the one age. We can kind of have different tiers from different ages.

So expect more of Quan Chi’s resurrected revenants then. Nice. If you were at rAge this year, you most likely got a chance to play the game, or at least see it in action. And you have to admit, it looks great. Smoother, faster and clearly having benefited from the work done on Injustice: Gods Amongs Us. “The new hardware has been so powerful that we don’t really have a big challenge comparatively to previous generations,” Himmerick explained.

I don’t want to say it’s the easiest, but Sony and Microsoft have been so good with the tools comparatively to history. I think it’s been harder on art than anything because look at the number of polygons used to create any character and it could have been done in a couple of weeks. Now it’s like a six week process. We have 150 people in the building, 30 temps, probably 15 different outsourcing companies, it’s crazy. It’s a good problem.

I quite dug playing as Scorpion in early builds of the game. The fan favourite spectre feels familiar, yet different in the game. And that all ties into the design ethos behind creating him and other returning characters. “Scorpion is the hardest because he’s Ed’s favorite, and he’s the poster boy for the game,” Himmerick said.

You can’t screw that up. We basically build Scorpion, and then we build things on. You can’t have the spear be part of a variation. That would never work. To have a variation that didn’t have the spear would be nuts. We make sure the fans get the character they know and love, while not making it an exact copy of what has come before. In Mortal Kombat X, I love the variation where you can summon a demon. You still have the spear and teleport and now a demon.

2015 is shaping up to be a damn good year for fighting games. Not only do we get Mortal Kombat X, but a new Street Fighter as well. I think I just had a fatality in my pants.

Last Updated: December 9, 2014