“When we finish one game and approach a that we’ve been away from for two years we can look at it with some fresh ideas,” says Boon, who believes that working only on the one series would have a negative effect on development. The team is constantly iterating between projects, using the momentum it gains to continue surpassing expectation, and Boon tells me that the studio treats the leap between Mortal Kombat and Injustice as a palette cleanser of sorts – a space that lets the studio develop new tech and ideas, building on them for the next game to come. Perhaps that is how NetherRealm is able to create something on this scale. That desire to go above and beyond is prevalent throughout the studio and the staff we are able to speak to. It might sound ridiculous, but it all pays off in the end. It has 62 DSLR cameras all pointed at the face of a single actor they sit down and then go through 50 different poses – cheeks out, squint, puffy, bare your teeth and so on…,” he says, acting them out as he does. Our lead character artist built this room in the studio from the ground up and he was one of the first to ever build them. “For Injustice 2 we started scanning actors – all our actors get scanned now.
Not that the team would want to back away from it, mind, because the results really do speak for themselves. It’s something the studio can’t back away from now, even if the increased workload is yet another strain on an already stacked development pipeline. When it comes to mocapping, Injustice 2 marked a noticeable shift in terms of production value. " go through 50 different poses – cheeks out, squint, puffy, bare your teeth and so on" Ed Boon, Creative Director And so I took the question to NetherRealm’s studio head John Hemerick – what the hell is going on with the animations in this game? “When we moved in here nine years ago – we left Midway and we joined Warner Brothers – and we built the studio from scratch in here,” Hemerick tells me, standing in the centre of a gigantic mocap room adorned with cameras, screens and rope rigging.
What really struck me was just how impressive the character animations were, particularly in the astounding cutscenes that do a decent enough job of staving away my desire for another shlocky live-action movie. Let’s isolate one aspect as an example: the story mode. “We have them all running in parallel and, somehow, it all comes together in the end.” “There are just so many major projects, each one of which is a two-year project in itself,” he continues. “Our story mode is an entire project in itself so is the Towers of Time, the online modes, all the fighting, it's just…” Boon sort of throws his arms up, he’s at a loss when considering the amount of effort and energy that has been poured into this project. One that, frankly, other studios in the industry would tackle over a number of years, treating the title as a Games as a Service to help mitigate the overflowing pipeline. To create and implement this level of content, not to mention pursuing these mechanical and system-level changes, is a huge undertaking. There's no such thing as too many modesīut putting something together on the scale of Mortal Kombat 11 isn’t easy. You’re forced to get up close and personal with your foe, to think tactically and act methodically. This small tweak forces a big shift in the way battles play out. One of the biggest changes to play that any MK veteran will immediately notice is the slower movement speed, with the ability to dash quickly across the arena removed. The result is a fighter that feels expressive and accessible, slick and approachable. As Boon explains it, the team was eager to alter the guiding philosophy behind the combat as it looked towards this new instalment. It feels different to Mortal Kombat X (to Injustice 2 as well, for whatever that’s worth) with the action unfurling itself on screen quickly, but more methodically than what has come before. Regardless of whether you want to engage in competitive combat, enjoy the wonderfully cinematic (and totally ridiculous) story mode, speed through the Towers of Time challenges, or waste away the hours changing up the costumes of your favourite fighters, you can feel the change surging through Mortal Kombat 11 as soon as you pick up a controller. So, from the very beginning of production, that was actually one of our goals,” he tells me. "We definitely don't want anybody to play Mortal Kombat 11 and go 'oh, it's just Mortal Kombat X with prettier graphics and different characters'. "As proud as we are of Mortal Kombat X, it was a very rushdown game" Ed Boon, Creative DirectorĪnd, finally, and perhaps most importantly for Mortal Kombat co-creator and Creative Director Ed Boon, it had to be feel different.
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