4th Miscellaneous Article

Mortal Kombat 11. Windows PC Version, NetherRealm Studios, 2019.

Mortal Kombat 11 released on April 23rd, to both a wave of compliments but also a flood of mass criticism directed at one particular portion of the game. This criticism lies in within the Krypt and the challenge towers of time. On the PC version (Steam version) the player reviews are at a mixed rating. This means it is roughly half and half on negative and positive but this is because time passed allowing more reviews. On the first day of its release it was review bombed (large groups of people leave negative user reviews online in the hopes of getting attention) because of the massive grind wall. The Krypt is a place where players can open up chests that will RANDOMLY give items like artwork, skins , and consumables. At first glance this is not a problem but players soon realized the horrid flaws in the system. This is a fighting game which means it has a selection of characters to chose from, in this case 19 characters. Not every player will want to play all of these characters instead selecting a few like 2 to 3, can you image the frustration within the Krypt as they constantly open up chests that give them items for characters they will never play. Not to mention the different types of chest having up to three different currencies that are increasing harder to get (Coins, Souls, Hearts). But this is not the worse of it, these challenge towers leave a very sour mouth in players. They are straight up unfair giving the AI massive advantage on every difficulty. Mind you these towers are main method of a way in game to earn the different currencies, as broken as they are. If the intent is not clear then allow me to spill it out, NetherRealm studios seeks to frustrate players with the unbalanced towers and RNG Krypt to push players to go buy the currencies to unlock the stuff they actually want. Its sad that this studio has also fallen victim to the microtranscations trend but luckily they seem to generally care and are beginning to balance things out reducing the grind, a good start. While NetherRealm studios seem to care about the future of their game another studio called
Bethesda would rather see their game crash and burn from their lies.