Every little bit is important. That's exactly my point. The moment you stop caring about the little details is the moment you have exposed yourself as being lazy and dispassionate about the quality of your work.

Consider that the artist or artists who made the renders where her skin was wrong work on the actual game team.

That means there are people working for NRS, on the game, capable of obvious oversights. If they got a render wrong, oh sure, it SEEMS like no big deal now because it's just a render...but it's also an EXAMPLE of what they COULD get wrong in the finished product because they don't care as much as they should about being consistent.
Now maybe YOU don't care about the little details, but it's not necessary for you to care because you're not the one creating the media. The people who create the media NEED TO CARE about the little details of their own creations.

Who knows MK better than you kids? Razor does.

You are talking about a game franchise where they change the characters' appearances in every single game. And they have just been through a major overhaul, first the crash of Midway, then getting their own studio under WB.

Cut them some slack, man. They just got onto a fresh start. Some mistakes will be made.

See...when you say that sentence, you say it with an "I've accepted this, it's just what happens" tone.

I look at that same sentence and see one of the fundamental errors of Mortal Kombat's art style.
(And of course we're not talking about wardrobes here, I like that the characters change clothes a lot, most of the time it actually fits the plot for them to do so. Obviously the issue is things like facial features.)

Yeeeeaaaaah... You do that then. *pats*

Condescend if you like because you don't care, but the fact still remains that the MK design team has shown less care for consistency in their work than their peers in the industry and that's not cool.

You've made up your mind about this game. And nothing I say that will be in its defence will be good enough for you, because you are right and I am wrong... or rather, that's how you have made it up in your mind.

And therefore, I'm not going to argue with you about a trifle little thing like this.

I love you to death Jaded-Raven, but, I'm totally with Razor here and I'm sure most other fans would agree with him as well.

"Little details" such as Jade's skin color and all those other (and many more) examples are what make the difference between "good" and "great" and "amateur" and "professional".

I understand anyone is bound to make mistakes, but, for this to happen constantly is ridiculous and it doesn't necessarily put them in a good light. It makes no sense. Its not a thing that should be brushed aside just because it feels like an insignificant detail that won't affect the final product.

They should be anal, protective, faithful, loyal, and respectful to their own franchise and property. Sometimes it feels like the fans care more than they do, and, well, thats just plain sad.



Hear hear!

No need to come off as such a condescending prick. Besides, Razor is right. If they would focus on the little stuff about which you white knight NRS fanboys keep saying "OMFG it's hair/skintone/a liver/etc. get over it the rest of the game is great," then the game really would be great and not the joke it has been for the past 15 years.

I can almost give them some slack, considering they've just come off of 6 horrible games and they're trying to get the BIG things right this time, but once that's done, it's the little things that are going to make them competitive with Tekken, SC, and SF, and if they don't, they can go right back on the trash heap like they have been, and we'll still be playing a download of MK2 on our PS5's when we get bored of Soul Calibur 8, wishing NRS would have shaped up. Or maybe they'll just keep doing reboot after reboot, cluelessly wondering why we don't like them when we liked the originals so much.

You didn't even have a counter-argument. You can't say "You've made up your mind and I can't change it" when you don't have any proof to change it WITH and you haven't even tried.

Seriously, I repeat:

- Where was Sub-Zero's scar in Deception?

- Why is Raiden's costume different from one render to the next in this game's promotional material?

- Why did they let Shaolin Monks turn out so wrong, up to and especially including the final scene with Quan Chi having tattoos and Kahn's corpse having the amulet for some reason?

- Why didn't they put "Saibot" on Noob's healthbar when the announcer says "Noob Saibot wins"?

That's just a SAMPLE of the times the MK team have fucked up their own intellectual property by being careless about details.

Look, if you want to sit on the sidelines in your self proclaimed real fan throne having never made anything of merit and tell us that NRS doesn't care about their franchise because they forgot someone's last name and its not going in the direction you want it to, that's fine. But don't call this game that is basically the reacharound fans have been asking for for nigh on 5 games anything close to lazy or fucked up.

The fact remains they've poured a ton of love into a ton of characters and content in this game, way more than they've ever done with any other game, the only one that even comes close is Deception and that games intrigue lasted about 2 weeks.

You wanna look around the industry and see how much "love" the other long lasting products out there are getting? The only one that comes even CLOSE is Tekken and Tekken has neither story nor intrigue anymore.

The fact remains MK characters are still getting appearance, move, plot, and personality developments the better part of 20 years later while Street Fighter characters can't even change their hairstyles.

Sorry, I've been a condescending prick against lollers and morons all night, I should get a red lamp that lights up when it's time to stop.

Being serious here then... Yes... it annoys me... that they can't get Jade's skin colour FUCKING RIGHT!!! But I am willing to give them a chance because of all the shit they've been through the last few years. They are people too. People make mistakes. And sometimes when you are hyped about something you've made, you overlook a few mistakes. And I like to think of Jade's light skin tone in her render as one of those mistakes that slipped through.

As for the other mistakes you guys mention... Most of them are based on personal opinions. I think the liver on the spike is a neat detail. It's over the edge and totally unnecessary... And that's what Mortal Kombat is about.

I like Mortal Kombat, and though it has disappointed me sometimes with a few things, it still has me hooked! Because though the small details are what makes a good game into a great game, we as fans have to remember what details to focus about... We have to remember what details are important! And Jade's skin colour in a render being lighter than in the game... it's not that big a deal when looking at the grand picture.

I agree with you regarding everything you have said, except this point.

I don't see this as a "mistake" or a "wrong doing" or something equally as bad or fatal as all those other things you mentioned.

The costume might just be different because they were trying out different designs for him and a main design was yet to be chosen or complete.

If those renders featured an unrecognizable Raiden (red hair, strange pupils, different skin color), then yes, I'd agree.

The fact that you only compare MK to other fighting games is your problem, Fenix, not mine.

I already brought up Halo as an example of a series whose creators pay more attention to consistency in plot and artwork, and this argument obviously was sparked by God of War being anal about the details of Kratos's looks and moves. There's a million video games out there where the creators take more care and are more anal about their creations.

If not fighting games where is your baseline?

Halo has a grand total of 5 core games and is a multi billion dollar media juggernaut backed exclusively by one of the biggest companies in the world. You know what, they've got the resources.

NRS is like, a hundred people. A hundred people who just barely kept from getting laid off when their previous parent company folded.

My baseline is the industry as a whole, "it's just a [insert genre here] game" or "we only had _____ number of workers" are shitty excuses for simple art and story matters. It only takes ONE artist to draw a single character. If you're the artist in charge of drawing Jade, you should look up what Jade fucking looks like and see "Oh, she was dark brown in every single game." And you only need ONE writer to remember HIS OWN PAST WRITING when making a script.
You'd think ONE of those hundred people could be responsible for remembering the things these dudes keep forgetting, like the simple act of typing "Saibot" on a healthbar.

it's not like it's too many letters to fit into the given space, "Noob Saibot" is exactly the same length as "Johnny Cage".

Regarding Tekken, I think it's gotten way more love than MK has. The story is very intricate now, and AFAIK, there aren't any glaring plot holes. It's not like Namco said in a sequel, oh wait, Heihachi was really good all along. All that stuff we said about him being bad, just forget about it. Now he's the protector of the Earth and a mentor to Jin, like MK did with Raiden between MK1 and 2. I'm sure there are other inconsistencies as bad or worse that Razor could bring up.

I would think they have these story things written down somewhere. It's not like they have to go back and play through each and every game to find out what happened with Kitana in MK2. The story is really pretty simplistic, it shouldn't be so difficult to avoid these obvious internal inconsistencies.

The only two possibilities are they're lazy, or they're just really inept at writing a coherent story. Of course, Razor can tell you more about that than I can.

There's no way they have an internal document for keeping track of the storyline. Or if they did, they just up and threw it away for this game.

I mean even if you excuse the things they do in MK9 because it's a reboot, and just look at the old canon, then the plotholes in Shujinko's Konquest alone in Deception, and what happened with Shaolin Monks, made it pretty clear that they just make stuff up as they go every time and don't really stop to look back at the old bios from MK1 thru 3 to make sure things match.

I hope you guys game development studios are very successful.

"Go do better yourself," is always the response the fanboy makes when he can't explain away how bad something is.

Try harder.

I could buy that if it were just If they wanted to change up the story so drastically, they should have started over with all new characters and a new world. That's the only way it makes sense. Or they should have just not tried to tie it to armageddon and the time travel stuff and just said, you know what, this story is a mess and has gotten way out of hand, let's try again.

Well, now they've made a new story for MK1-3, so whatever the past storyline was doesn't really matter for the future canon. Maybe that's why they did it. Maybe they didn't like the past storyline, so they made some grand changes to start anew and tell the story differently, trying something new.

Some people like it, some people don't. They can't satisfy everyone.

Being a programmer is not a prerequisite for critiquing writing and art.

I haven't complained at all about the gameplay, have I?

Although while I'm here, I would like to express my frustration that Johnny's "Shadow Kick" STILL doesn't have real shadows even though I KNOW they can make them in 3D because Scorpion's teleport DOES leave an afterimage and one of Sareena's charge attacks in Armageddon left several like a proper Shadow move should.
If it's not gonna leave shadows, why don't they change its name to the "Glowing Kick"?

You can criticize all you want, what grinds my gears is kids who've never done anything calling people who's lives revolve around this stuff lazy or uncaring. You think these people who've spent the last 4 years of their life on this shit don't care about mistakes? wtf is wrong with you? Everyone makes mistakes.

And some people CORRECT their own mistakes when they make them.

NRS makes them twice and pretends they're doing it on purpose.

I have a great idea how about razor fills out an application for NRS studios and fix all the problems that are stated so when the next game drops it will be perfect and the best mk ever