Mortal Kombat 11

Yeah, no.

I have played this game pretty continuously since it came out Tuesday. At this point I have:
1) Completed all parts of Story Mode
2) Completed Endings for every character in the game in Classic Tower
3) Played some Online Kasual.
4) Done enough time tower play to be in the top 20% scorer for this week (thus far).

At this point I have unlocked less than 2% of all available unlocks. I have maybe three characters with more than 4 skins and almost none of the additional fatalities and brutalities. I have not earned enough time Crystals to make even one purchase in their store, despite all that play time.

Heart Chests do exist and may indeed be static, but it takes 250 Hearts to open one. Each Fatality gives one, each Brutality gives two, and some towers can give between 5-30 depending on the length of the tower in question. So lets say you hit a Klassic 8 fight tower on Medium and manage a Brutality on each fight and get bonus hearts (some characters have really hard ones to execute and the CPU does all it can to prevent this) you would net you 19-26 Hearts and probably take about 15-20 minutes if you are playing a character you can faceroll with. So, four fucking hours to unlock one static heart chest. Mind you most of these chests are behind locks that require grinding to unlock as well. So yeah, four hours a static chest... compared to 9 or even 10?

Then there is the coin grind, which is crucial for getting to chests for consumables and other gear for the Time Towers. Once you have dusted Story Mode, which gives you 100kish or so, the Time Towers are the fastest way to grind coin, if you can consistently face roll them (more on that later). A typical mini tower will give you 5k and clearing an entire set will usually give you about 40k or so. In fights, if you are consistently executing combos of good damage, you can pile on 400ish per won round. So your typical 4 tower set will net you 75k-100k if you are lucky. This assumes you play beatdown characters and not controlling/zoning/chip characters who get fucked on the per round bonus due to never doing big damage combos. Assuming you can roll a set without having to grind consumables to tackle it, you can usually pull this off in 60-90 minutes, depending. You also get some coin by opening barriers in the Krypt, but these are one time deals that require expenditure of other resources (including coins) and poking around to find. But for the sake of our purposes, lets say you are good and can bang out 100k an hour (probably unrealistic, but more on that later) in the Time Towers. That will open about ten chests, on average. There are literally hundreds and you can end up with dupes, so they put in a respawn mechanism (which also costs coins) to account for this. There are also character unlocks that are only obtainable through the Time Towers, which have character specific towers (more on that later) but those also cost 25k coins to unlock. And aside from the character specific Towers, you are dealing with the RNG the whole time. So if you want a specific skin or finisher for your favorite character, you either hope its a reward for the character tower or you hope the RNG gods bless you in an ocean of thousands of concept arts, icons, backgrounds, consumables, gear, and other characters that its buried in. That is where the Loot Boxes really come in, though (as Angry Joe pointed out) its just cleverly semantically disguising them as something else. And oh yeah there are also Souls that are needed to open gates in the Krypt to get at the heart chests and RNG chests of their own to deal with.

So lets talk about the Time Towers for a moment. The Klassic Towers are what you would mostly expect from the MK experience, with a series of opponents ending with the main boss. They also pay garbage (like less than a third of a Time Tower), so if you want to go this route, prepare to triple your grinding. So then there is the Time Towers. These come in four general flavors:
1) Guantlet- Somewhat comparable to the Klassic, but more difficult due to random cornholes being applied to fights. Aside from the random effects being a cynical attempt to burn consumables, these are mostly ok, but should pay out much more.
2) Timed Challenges- These are sets of towers built around a theme that sometimes require specific characters. They always include some really annoying effect that ranges from merely annoying to outright crippling, depending on the style of character you use. They pay out at the normal rate and cycle somewhat frequently, but are not easy enough for the average player to do consistently without burning consumables (more grinding).
3) Weekly Challenges- These are themed towers built around character story, a lot like some in Injustice 2. They are not too difficult to do and pay fairly well, but are a one per week thing.
4) Character Towers- You pay 25k Coins to unlike these and can only have a single one active at a time. They pay similar to most time sets, but completing a set gives you specific drops related to the character. Unfortunately, they are stacked with effects designed to frustrate the fuck out of you based in the character in question. Playing a zoner character? Welp, here comes tag in pal attack on a 15 sec cooldown, fire auras, and every opponent will be a top tier rush down character. Playing a rushdown character? Enjoy constant ice rains, low gravity, and a never ending roster of zoners with teleports. Playing a big beat character? Every enemy will have fire aura and block/stall constantly while freezes rain down randomly. Also, prepare for blindness constantly. These were clearly made to be as annoying as fucking possible and to require consumables for average people to even have a chance at them. Even if you are skilled, its going to take a lot of work to get through these and then you wind up with one skin, one set of gear, and one other character related unlock. Then you have to pay 25k to put your dick in the meat grinder again if you want to keep unlocking for that character.

Another fun thing I have not mentioned is that some towers are AI fights. Yes, you literally sit there and watch the CPU beat itself up using AI tendencies you pick for a character. Since the CPU is retarded and stands in damage zones and almost never does finishers, this results in slower farming and lots of restarts. You also basically can only win if you pick one of the cheesier AI characters (Jax is good for this) and hope their kryptonite matchup does not come up. I have a greatly leveled Jax because of this stupid mechanic, despite having zero desire to play him. Oh, and hilariously, it also spams blindness during these (which the CPU ignores) so you are watching a blank screen of a fight while AFKing through this shit a lot of the time. Who the fuck thought this was fun?

So really, the core issue here is that the casuals (the bread and butter paying customers) and even middling guys (me) are not going to feasibly grind through to the things they want without burning assloads of time. That 3000 hours is more realistic for someone who plays fighting games at a high level. As someone who managed to unlock everything in the last MK, I cannot see this grind taking less than double that time. And even worse, more than half the Time Towers that are needed to do things at a descent pace, are littered with frustrating effects designed to make consumables required for many, thus adding another layer of grind. And if you are out of consumables, enjoy a nice slow eaking grind out in the Classic Towers, because anything resembling the "series of battles against enemies then boss" layout is largely confined to there. Most of the Time Towers are just straight up dick punching to extend the grind. And this does not even touch on the way chip/zoner characters get less coin through normal play.....

I love the core mechanics, look, and feel of this game. The audio is the best in any fighting game ever. But fuck this grind. NetherRealm just literally EAed themselves, especially after how Injustice 2 put casuals off.

The real issues here are that the fatalities and brutalities are buried in with the rest of the garbage and the way the Skins unlock you basically roll the dice and have to go through all color variants of one skin before you even see one that actually has new graphic elements to it. And the time towers are mostly bulshit the play to the point where it's just not even remotely fun. I mean you can turn your character on a i and it will get all the same bullshit advantages that computer gets but what is the fucking point of paying $60 for a game just to watch it play with itself? As a casual fighting player I was able to unlock everything in the previous two crypts in a reasonable amount of time before I got bored with the game. In its current state that's completely impossible in this game which is a shame because the actual bread-and-butter mechanics of it are pretty good and the presentation of the graphics and audio is the best I've ever seen in a fighter.

Having the extra brutalities and fatalities work is all fine and good for the guys who make one character and focus on that. But for the Casual crowd who jump around here there's a lot to experiment we more or less need to see that screen every once in awhile to know what those moves are especially since currency game is directly tied into your ability to execute them. Also I don't know how deep in the Krypt you Dells but there are a lot of heart cheslock behind barriers especially when you get down to Goro's Lair and all the traps sections. And almost all of them are 250 hearts that I've come across the hundred heart ones are very rare comparatively. Put him let's say every chest was just a hundred Hearts you'd still be spending in over an hour to open a single chest in the game without taking into account the need to unlock barriers to get to a number of them. The soles currency is the weird one because the souls just seem to give better stuff and less cosmetic bulshit but souls are fairly slow to earn and you need them to unlock certain events in the towers of time themselves.

Anyhow I know what I've been experiencing in my opinion remains unchanged. They cool off the super Health bonuses that the time Tower AI enemies get which is one step of about 10 then you need to do to make this game not a total suckfest for casuals. I hope they do more because as I said the actual down and dirty game play graphics and audio are phenomenal. I don't think I've seen a fighting game out of the gate where the character balance was this good on release

I was looking forward to this, but given the SJW / RMT bullshit, its a hard pass.

Well keep buying games riddled with microtransaction bullshit and see if they stop putting it in the game.

Tarisk said:

Imaginary demons. There's no SJW shit, and again, I've not felt a SINGLE inclination to even consider a RMT, i've got 2k of the time coins from the game's handouts and haven't even found a reason to spend any yet.

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Oh you mean the females weren't given extra cloth to cover tits and hips, while male nudity is not a problem?

I understand actually reading up on games is probably beyond you, but you should try it so you don't come across as a stupid faggot. You can avoid the stupid part of your image man, work on it.



Guessing by 2021 we'll be seeing women in burkas fight men in borat strings.

So you noticed I post in the politics forum and you thought that was a strong reply?

Ok buddy. I hear some people wore two different socks a while back to support people like you, so have fun!

Skinner said:

So you're saying 2021 Mortal Kombat will be a representation of Europe?

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Jade already wears a burka and Jaqui Wakanda has a skin called Justice Warrior..... so yeah.

Here is the thing right now. Most of us are just letting the AI do most of the grinding while occasionally playing to learn stuff. And honestly it might be better with the current state of the towers atm, since you learn nothing by having consumable spam and double health enemies who abuse perfect block to fight. So if you want to farm, you take a beatdown character and set AI on Counnters to 30 and then (based on the character and tower) crank either Rushdown or Combos to 30. Some guys have had an a fighter on AI in the endless classic since release with their X button on continuous auto to exploit this. You can tell because the guy on top is level one despite having 93 million points (for comparison, I played all day yesterday farming towers mostly and I am at 15 million and supposedly top 5% this week), so odds are that shit is getting nerfed before they actually fix anything if they even can. Its retarded and clearly not playtested at all, because any gamer would have figured this shit out in ten seconds knowing how currency is generated in game.

Ed Boon was in such a hurry to bow down and kiss SJW cock that he forgot to make a playable experience for the bulk of the player base, the casuals. This is how fighting franchises die, because without us noobs there is no hype at tournaments. Its hard to believe how quickly they nose dived when MK9 and MK10 were such solid games that did awesome fan service. This is why you cannot let the SJWs or the corp loot crate whores in the front door of a major franchise. They fuck up everything they lay there hands on. Funny thing is if you strip out the krypt, allow those of us who like the over the top bikini fighters their skin choices, and trim back the virtue signaling, its a great fighting game and well balanced. Too bad the feels and deals crowd had to fuck it all up, but Injustice 2 should have been a warning to the fans. That game went from great to shit within minutes of story mode ending and its version of Time Towers were no where near as grindy or fucked up. I wanted sexy women and roided out men beating the shit out of each other in over the top ultraviolence. Instead I got a fighting game that's target demographic appears to be gay muslim men. Whoever did the makeover on Jade to slap her into a burka needs to be legally barred from ever touching game design again. Same shit with Skarlet turning into butterface Burka woman. Its fucking sad that the most entertaining characters in the game are Kano and Cage, when you know these dipshits were trying to parody maleness and Poe'd themselves in their ineptitude.