Man, do I love spoilers!
So with a few lucky people getting their hands on the game early, the game's story has been revealed. While it is possible at this point there could be more secret endings that haven't been found yet, from what I have seen so far, there appears to be one definitive ending to this story, and I have seen some mixed reactions about it. So obviously spoilers here:
After determining that Kronika's plan is reliant on Liu Kang and Raiden being against one another, Raiden decides to merge his own essence with Liu Kang, which frees him from his corruption and gives him godlike powers. Liu Kang uses his and Raiden's combined power to destroy Kronika, but not before Kronika takes him quite some time in the past. Liu Kang is advised by a now mortal Raiden to retrieve Kitana and for the two of them to oversee the creation of a new timeline. The story ends with Liu Kang and Kitana arriving at the dawn of time to see the new timeline begin
Now I personally think that this ending is badass, serving as both great closure and allowing endless possibilities for the writers to take the next game.
I have seen some people with quite contrary reactions; they see this as every other character being erased from existence, leaving only Liu and Kitana left. Some theorize that the other characters will never come to exist now, or will be so vastly different that we will no longer be familiar with them.
As a counter-argument to that, I'll say while that could theoretically happen (maybe Liu and Kitana accidentally butterfly effect something). do you really think that NRS will actually get rid of their famous characters? I highly, highly doubt there's any reason for concern with that happening.
What I do think will happen is we'll see a future game with a slightly altered history that puts Liu Kang in Raiden's place for a good amount of time. We may see a different character serving as the Mortal Kombat Champion, such as Kung Lao. For the most part every returning character (which there will likely be plenty of) will be spiritually intact; Johnny Cage will still feel like Johnny Cage, Cassie will still feel like Cassie, Scorpion will still feel like Scorpion, and so on. I do think most returning characters will keep large portions of their character arcs intact, and we can probably see some carrying over from the events of MK11 despite the timeline being different. We might get a few changes, but in my opinion those changes are probably things the writers wanted to change anyway, and the new timeline can just be an excuse to do that (at least now they'll have an excuse).
I'll leave it with this: I'm hyped to play this story mode and soak in all the details in person, I think the ending is very good; I understand that a lot of people might have concerns about the ending, but I think the story will continue moving in a good direction in the future. I'll leave the thread to you all who saw the ending to discuss what you thought of it and where you'd like to see it go from here.
