*Signs*

First off, shouldn't this be in the Overall MK Discussion?

Vogel > Tobias in terms of story quality. The main issue with the Vogel era of the MK story is with certain retcons. In terms of characters, the Vogel era is much better. Scorpion has become a joke. Liu Kang had been quite bland, redundant, and fairly shallow with him being dragged on. Baraka is still 1-dimensional and highly cliché in the character type he is. He and Goro have been drawn out so much and have had their run.

This isn't to say that Tobias hasn't done anything good. I do like a fair bit of the characters from that era. However, the Tobias era roster is somewhat overrated, mainly due to nostalgic reasons. The likes of Bo' Rai Cho, Nitara, Hotaru, and Ashrah are more distinct and have a uniqueness to them that makes them better than characters like Kano, Baraka, Sheeva, etc.

Looking back at MK1's roster, Sub-Zero, Raiden, and Shang Tsung are the only ones there I truly like. Liu Kang, Goro, Johnny Cage, Kano, and Reptile have had their run. Scorpion is an utter joke now, and I still feel iffy on Sonya.

MK doesn't really need Tobias. They are better off with Vogel in terms of the story. It's just that certain issues need to be sorted out for improvement.

How did I know you had to disagree with everything I like, including this?

Tobias is also the guy who gave us Reiko, Jarek, and Chameleon; while Vogel gave us Kenshi, Havik, Nitara, and Ashrah. And personally, I'll take Daegon or Kobra over Liu Kang any day. At least they have personality.

Truth is, the problem isn't so much who's writing, but are they being given enough time to do so? When Vogel is given time to create a fleshed out story, he can come up with some good stuff (Deadly Alliance). When he's forced to work a deadline and play along with the Midway's demands, his work suffers. It wasn't his idea to bring everybody back in Armageddon. It wasn't his idea to wrap everything up in one game like that. He also needs to lay off the retcons.

Tobias is/was capable of producing a well thought out storyline when he was given the chance...like Mythologies. And he did give us some great characters and concepts. However, when we often saw him making things up as he went along, he would churn out shit.

If Tobias came back, some thing would improve. Some things would get worse. Overall, it would be pretty much the same.

*Sigh*

Tobias is long gone...

It'd be better to just give MK to a new team. -_-

Yeah, wrong forum and MK needs no "saving" improving of course we all want all future games to improve lol I agree with Subzerothe7th Vogel is a talent story writer, and Tobias left Midway to do his own thing which in case you haven't noticed was a complete bomb(in a bad way) with his fighting game....

Tobias isn't coming back...

I'm sure if he did, it would be front page news...

John's over in Microsoft's camp, or was as of Tao Feng. His Studio Gigante group is part of Microsoft gaming studios, so Microsoft owns them.

And from the tone of the departure of team members to create Studio Gigante with existing MK Team members, I'm sure you will never see Tobias work on another MK game ever again.

Remember, he left with other members due to disagreements and not liking where the creative direction of MK was going.

Now I'm starting to get frustrated. Studio Gigante closed down, so no, Tobias is NOT doing his own thing.

And the whole point of this petition/thread was to try and GET him to come back. Did he say "I will never work with Midway ever again." or no?


Ummm... No. I'm not about to debate opinions with you. Vogel is the same guy who said "In Mortal Kombat nobody ever really dies." That speaks for itself right there. I can pretty much end my post right here. Which I shall. I know a joke when I see one.


You don't know that John "will never work on a MK game ever again".

Did he say that? He up and left because of problems with management - According to Scott Howell. Midway now has new management.

Midway pays attentions to petitions. This is to show them that we care about Tobias and need him back.

Can we get this up on the news section/front page?

Studio Gigante got closed down a while ago. What I'd like to know is what the fuck John Tobias is doing now.

I prefer Vogel, actually...

Cool, cool. Did you remember to sign the petition, though?

People do trechnically die in Mortal Kombat, but it's not like they're gone forever.

Anyway, I realy don't ever see him returning. He probably wouldn't want to, and Midway probably wouldn't let him.

A pair of fresh eyes might be a good thing (particularly a writer instead of a programmer), but I'm sure some of those lengthy posts have already pointed out how average the Tobias era was.

It made a great foundation, but I think we can all acknowledge the story got a lot thicker with MKDA. That never seemed likely with the more trixy connections in Tobias' stuff.

If you give me a Pen and a Notecard, i can come up with a better story for an MK game han Tobias ever did...And that is comng from a person that used to think Tobias WAS the savior...

Meh, as has already been pointed out, Tobias' stuff was pretty basic. It lacked polish, substance, basically what the mk story has now thanks to vogel. Aside from the occasional retcon, vogel's skills are much better than Tobias.

Hopefully midway and the mk team saw the error in their ways of rushing the story(thanks mostly in part to the backlash on this forum) and they'll give vogel a chance to flesh out a great story this time around.

**doesn't sign**

p.s. i don't like petitions. nothing personal.

Vogel may have said that, but Tobias established that "rule" himself with the ridiculous contradictions in Johnny Cage's storyline with him being killed and coming back and so on. And then you had other bad parts such as the recycling of the Scorpion - Sub-Zero feud in MK4. Tobias could write a good storyline, but he botched some things along the way as well, so it's not as though you can say Vogel was the only one to do it.

And I think Tobias coming back would probably make things a lot more difficult if he replaced Vogel. I wouldn't mind so much if, by some miracle, he came back and he and Vogel co-operated on the storyline, but I don't see it happening no matter how many names on the petition.

This is absurd. Vogel has done far better than Tobias with the storyline. How biased can you be with that ridiculous comparison of characters? During Tobias' reign, we also had Stryker, Nightwolf, Chameleon, Khameleon... And it's beyond me how people can dislike Mokap. It's a private joke character, you're not meant to take him seriously, and it's funny.

Vogel gave us the Noob Saibot - Sub-Zero twist, the Damashi - Onaga twist, Quan Chi and Shang Tsung's deadly Alliance... Fantastic things that Tobias never did. How creative did Tobias have to be to come out with MK1, which was just flat out based on Enter the Dragon? What about the absurd storyline of MKII? MK3 had an interesting beginning with Sindel being revived on Earth, but what about UMK3 and MKTrilogy? Yeah that took a lot of hard work. MK4? Worst storyline in the history of the MK games.

You don't think Kenshi's an awesome character? You don't like what they've done with Ermac, Rain and Noob Saibot? Remember, Tobias came up with Ermac (we assume), but he didn't come up with the Ermac we now know who has awesome costumes and a great storyline.

People overcredit Tobias to ridiculous levels.

This is absurd. Vogel has done far better than Tobias with the storyline. How biased can you be with that ridiculous comparison of characters? During Tobias' reign, we also had Stryker, Nightwolf, Chameleon, Khameleon... And it's beyond me how people can dislike Mokap. It's a private joke character, you're not meant to take him seriously, and it's funny.

Vogel gave us the Noob Saibot - Sub-Zero twist, the Death of Liu Kang, the Damashi - Onaga twist, Quan Chi and Shang Tsung's deadly Alliance... Fantastic things that Tobias never did. How creative did Tobias have to be to come out with MK1, which was just flat out based on Enter the Dragon? What about the absurd storyline of MKII? MK3 had an interesting beginning with Sindel being revived on Earth, but what about UMK3 and MKTrilogy? Yeah that took a lot of hard work. MK4? Worst storyline in the history of the MK games.

You don't think Kenshi's an awesome character? You don't like what they've done with Ermac, Rain and Noob Saibot? Remember, Tobias came up with Ermac (we assume), but he didn't come up with the Ermac we now know who has awesome costumes and a great storyline.

People overcredit Tobias to ridiculous levels. And I just read, LouisTypo, that you called Vogel a joke because he said in Mortal Kombat nobody ever really dies. Well no shit, TOBIAS ESTABLISHED THAT when he brought back Johnny Cage over and over again. In fact, Vogel tried to fix Tobias' bullshit with Cage by retconning all those revivals, which was a good move IMO. And come on, lets not bullshit ourselves, I like coherent storylines as much as everyone else, but we all have favorite characters that have died in the story... and I'm sure we were all glad they were back in Armageddon.

How can you call Vogel's reign a joke when the games became darker once he became the lead writer? With Tobias' games we had babalities, animalities, the most absurd fatalities of all time in MK3, the blandest Liu Kang and Scorpion ever with Liu always being the pure, saint top dog, and Scorpion always out for revenge or being hired by Shao Kahn or something, while Vogel KILLED Liu Kang and made him a zombie later and turned Scorpion into the Champion of Elder Gods and also shifted his focus from Sub-Zero to Quan Chi.

This is one hell of an absurd discussion.

i like Daegon.

John was around for MK3-MK4(MKDA also) FROM MY PERSPECTIVE MKs worst years.

what the MK team needs to do is hire forum member Check. so that Glitches & infinites can be found and removed.

Tobias never fleshed the stories out at all... and remember, Vogel can't control which characters are going to be in the game. Tobias could, basically, do that since he was co-creator. Vogel is simply given what characters they want in, and he has to go from there. Storyline wise, there is no better Mortal Kombat game than MK:DA. Vogel had a lot of time to work on the story, and it was extremely good. MK:D wasn't quite as good, and MKA was of course, abysmal. But as I said, it wasn't his decision to bring back all the characters. Could anyone really had made a good story for some of those characters? Maybe, but I really doubt it, as some of them are just pointless, bad or worse, dead. It causes a lot of problems if you bring back all those things at once.

I prefer Vogel to Tobias... he's just better, even if MKA was terrible and largely will be without a coherent storyline. The first few MK games had very general plots and little in the way of character development, especially for characters that weren't considered "major". Only MK4 had the storyline that was close to being on par with some of Vogel's better work.

Anyway, this is "generally" MK related... and belongs in the Overall MK Discussion forum.

So you're saying I'm obliged to agree with you on something? You're almost making it out to be as if I'm purposely disagreeing with you to piss you off or something. And I thought I had issues....



That's it? That's all you have in response to my reply? You're still overrating Tobias.

Vogel may have said that, but that doesn't mean he necessarily likes it or has control over it. For example, Hsu Hao was one of the many characters to return in MKA, going with the whole "no one ever really dies" thing, which should really mean "no one ever really stays dead". Anyway, Hsu Hao happens to be a character that Vogel isn't fond of, but his return was something that was not in his control.

One thing you failed to realize was that many characters back in the day weren't well-fleshed out and didn't really get much development. Liu Kang and Johnny Cage come to mind. Then you have the overuse of those two along with Baraka and maybe some others. The Tobias era brought forth many pallete-swapped characters, most of which didn't have any real depth or substance to them. In the Vogel era, something was actually done with the likes of Ermac, Rain, and Noob Saibot.

I didn't read any of the posts in this thread after mine.

This isn't some kind of discussion I'm trying to get going on here. This thread was solely to raise awareness about the petition.

Y'all just don't know what you're talking about. Just cuz Vogel visits MKO y'all get on your knees with the quickness so you'll automatically believe he's some kind of savior. Not me.

MK needs help. MK:DA was just plain poor. You mean to tell me that two guys who were pretty much always on the same side to begin with all the sudden NOW become some huge big threat? I'm not buyin' it.