Mortal Kombat 11's Sudden Death

More of an execution than a fatality

It had so much more to live for.

After months of radio silence and with a meagre two-year lifespan behind it, comprising three major content updates and multitudes of smaller patches, Mortal Kombat 11 and its fans have been struck the fatal, final blow via the game’s official Twitter account.

What the hell happened? Even after weeks upon weeks with nary a peep from the developers at Netherrealm Studios the community at-large was holding out hope for another major update, sharing wish lists for Fighter Pack 3 debating why their favorites would be worthy to fill out the final slots on the roster, arguing over whether more guests would be welcome when there were still so many MK originals not present, and dissecting every stray syllable in every word Ed Boon has ever spoken or tweeted to try to glean some kind of hint, some promise of more coming down the line.

Now, with a gut-punch of an announcement delivered with all the pomp and circumstance of a layoff notice, those hopes have been violently dashed across fields of bloody spikes. No more characters, no more stages, no more content. Mortal Kombat 11, heralded as one of if not the best game in the franchise and widely considered to be in peak form after the Ultimate update, is dead.

There are yet to be any discussions about end-of-life balancing efforts though some may be forthcoming, but in the meantime it's a hell of a lurch to leave the players in considering the game still has one of the healthiest active user bases of any modern fighting game.

For a title with that kind of ongoing community support, be it by the expansive player base or the high-profile tournament scene (including being a main-stage game at this year’s EVO,) a surprise twitter eulogy months after the fact is not the send-off MK11 or its community deserve, and it’s a damn shame that this is the way the developers and publishers have chosen to go about it.

It all begs the question: why now? Why like this, almost as an afterthought? If Ultimate was to be the final patch, why not communicate that back in November in the run-up to its release? Truth be told there is no answer that would satisfy a massive community that was told this game would be supported “longer than any previous NRS title," according to a tweet from Senior UI Artist Daanish Syed.

Two years of support is indeed longer than any past Netherrealm game has received, but not by much and it certainly doesn’t live up to the “several more years of development” mentioned in passing. Compare that to triple-A contemporaries like Street fighter V and Tekken 7 which are coming up on their fifth and sixth years of active support respectively, and it almost feels like a joke. A bad one, too.

On the other hand, one of the reasons this hurts so much is because of the sheer amount of content NRS was able to pack into the game in such a relatively short timespan. 12 additional characters, dozens of skins, hundreds of colors and well over a thousand customizable costume pieces, all packaged with an incredibly solid base game that featured a fully realized cinematic story, an in-depth yet accessible tutorial mode built on the same principles they pioneered in Injustice 2, the best version of their rotating challenge towers to date, an entire game-within-a-game in the form of the Krypt, and superlative online functionality thanks to their incorporation of rollback net code.

Even with all their years of support, no other game even comes close to offering the same amount of stuff MK11 has, so it’s easy to see why fans would be so desperate for more, but it’s also very hard to take any accusations of the game being unfinished seriously. No other title on the market offers a comparable value proposition for the discerning buyer, nothing compares to the dollars-to-fun ratio this game offers players, and there are no signs of that changing anytime soon.

It’s been a hell of a run for what feels like a one-of-kind game, and it feels too soon to be saying goodbye when it feels like there’s still so much left to offer. But up to his point we’ve not addressed the other elephant in the room: what now?

The next big thing, of course. The tweet acknowledges that NRS has moved on, even if the fans have not, and are hard at work on their next project. No details yet on exactly what that is but most of the speculation revolves around the possibility of Injustice 3, and after the ongoing Injustice comics delivered an unexpected (but not unwelcome) Masters of the Universe crossover we can’t say we’re not interested in seeing He-Man take on the fascist Superman and his dictatorial Regime.

The other possibility, and one less far-less talked about, is that the studio is shifting all of its assets towards working on a game for their recently acquired Marvel license but considering the implications there brings us into some truly wild theory territory. Could we be looking at a Marvel vs. DC crossover game in the very near future? Tough to say until we hear more, but the second we do then so will you, faithful reader.

MK11 may be dead, but Netherrealm marches on. Nothing is over.

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Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate is available now on PC via Steam, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch

Images courtesy of Netherrealm Studios and Warner Bros. Games