Absolutely. I had reflected about something similar too: NeRdS would release some of the "missing" MK9 fighters via DLC later on. They would get to milk us as they wish and people would mostly love having them.

Espio had an idea like this, and I agreed with it. I always thought the dead characters should be playable, just not in the story mode.

By itself, I'm for this idea. Story relevance should not mean complete exclusion. My only problem is the roster number. When you get too many characters in a game, the match-up chart starts to get ridiculous, especially when the game engine requires knowing your opponents strings to successfully guard/parry (EX: Soul Calibur V).

Beyond that, I'm all for it. If carrying over the previous roster means having roughly 35 characters, then why not. No one should have to lose their main just because s/he isn't integrated into the story. However, any more than that can make the competitive element suffer. Even in MK9, we're seeing good players getting knocked out by low-tier characters because they didn't know the match-up.

As long as each character maintains a unique style of fighting that makes them formidable in their own right, the amount of them shouldn't matter too much.

Good examples are Marvel vs Capcom 2 and 3. Every character has their own unique style, without overshadowing the anyone else.

As for the match-ups, screw it. I'm a "Anyone should kick anyone's ass" kind of guy, even with games like Pokemon.

I wouldn't even mind repeated move sets if the properties were tweaked to vary the styles. As long as they were aesthetically different, I agree.


See, that's where I disagree. It's so difficult to make a game where each character has different options and yet still has the same competitive odds, and the more characters you throw in, the harder it is.

Going back to MvC2, that game had roughly fifty-something characters, and only about 17-20 were viable (and even then, those characters only worked well in very specific teams). The mind behind the definitive MvC2 tier list (Viscant) even said that if the game kept evolving, Strider's mix-up options may have gotten so good that Strider would have been unbeatable. I guess we'll never know now, but it's food for thought.

But even if NRS made a perfectly-balanced game with 50 characters, I still don't think learning 50 match ups is reasonable for the competitive players. I wouldn't want to spend $1,000 to travel to a tournament only to get randomed out by a Drahmin or Meat player (no offense to Drahmin).

Nice idea.

Yep. That's how the Naruto games do it, Haku was playable long after he died and I appreciated that because he was my favorite lol.

Anyway yeah I agree although it won't be the case with the next MK because they clearly killed everyone so they could have a bunch of cool evil people they could focus on.

I would love to continue the match-up discussion and tell you why I think match-ups are stupid, but we might wanna do it in another thread.

We MKO folks tend to get off topic quite easily, no? lol

Why yes, I mean yeah.
I was eating this sandwich with cucumber, butter and the nicest cheese you could get from the market before going to play some tennis with friends and w00t, that was delicious. We had good tennis games, even even ones, though I and my teammate lost slightly to those champions.
But I digress. The sandwich was really good and I think I will make a new one tomorrow. Wonderful cheese is better than meat IMHO yet expensive.

"Leave the dead out of the main game but make them available in multiplayer" doesn't make sense when they already spoiled that the next game's going to have MK9's dead being used as an army by Shinnok and Quan Chi.
Plus it doesn't really address the main reason to leave a character out of a game: resource allocation. "If the devs don't make Kung Lao, they can spend that time and disk space making Kai instead". Having two rosters is just going "Make Kai...but make Kung Lao TOO!" At which point, the question becomes "Assuming we can accomplish that...then what's the point of having two rosters? Why not just put Kung Lao on the arcade select screen if we already bothered to put him on the disk, what's the difference?"

I thought the separation will put it in better perspective, since the additional characters aren't in the actual roster.

I just wanted everyone to be satisfied with the situation. I myself still hope all the characters who died don't return.

Did you play Raiden's chapter?

Are you hoping MK10 will have some sort of giant timeskip where we don't even see Shinnok's invasion, it just happens offscreen?

Are you expecting them to reboot again?

I don't understand how your hope works when we KNOW what comes next because the end of the last game was very, very explicit about it. That's like going outside during a storm and saying "I hope I don't get rained on." The water's already falling. Quan Chi and Shinnok already told us what they're going to do with all those zombies.

Here's the thing. I can semi agree with you that yes, we can have a seperate arcade mode where everyone is playable. However, is anyone REALLY going to care when they bring in a lot of characters that nobody has heard of in the story mode?

I shouldn't say nobody, the MK diehards do know about them, but a lot of people are going to come into them brand new while all of the iconic characters are left dead (Liu Kang, Kung Lao, Sub-Zero, Kitana, Jax, etc...) They are all dead and I'm sorry NRS really f'd up on that.

I'm sure when they were writing this someone said "hey, let's shock the hell out of them." Now though I bet they are kind of wondering what to do without making it look like a cop out.

The fact is they killed half of their heroes while leaving nearly all of their villains alive.

Kano, Sektor, Reptile, Sheeva, Baraka are all left alive. It's just kind of shocking to me. The sad thing is like 3 of them have never had a good part in the story, yet they were left alive. Why not kill some of these lackeys to make room? Hell, they even killed two of their best villains(Shang Tsung, and Noob Saibot) while leaving the lackey villains alive. I just don't understand what the hell they were thinking this time around with the story.

I'm just going to hold off on the next game to see what the future holds, but if the story isn't great then I probably won't buy. The story is what has kept me hooked for all of these years, while the gameplay came second to me.

I feel like it's going to be hard to get into the story of the next game though. It's just not clicking with me at the moment.

You don't understand what I'm saying at all, man.

Even if the characters are being used as zombies, that doesn't mean they have to be in the game. I don't want any of them in the roster. I don't want any them playable. I would also prefer if they had minimal story time.

As a Quan Chi fan and huge fan of MK4, I kinda take it in offense that you assumed I didn't want to see that game's story. But that's just me being a whiny ass baby.

I do want the story, I don't want to play with a bunch of zombies. Liu Kang was enough.

I totally agree with Scar_Subby. I probably won't even buy MK10 if all the characters that died don't make it to the next and are just "swept under the rug", I wonder what the stroy planning was like at NRS? "hmmm lets see, we can kill all the characters the general public identifies with MK (Sub-Zero, Kitana, Kung Lao), leave all the shitty characters alive (Sheeva, Baraka...the list goes on) and introduce even more shitty character in the next game (Kobra, Tsu Hao, Jarek...the list still rolls) and BLAMMO!!! We kill our franchise so we can become one of DC's little subsidiaries"....

I actually tweeted Boon and told him to tell some EX-CARPENTER TURNED SHITHEAD WRITER JOHN VOGEL that I said thanks for taking a dump all over the story and killing off all the characters me and millions of others grew up with. I mean, Armageddon happened because Vogel couldn't write a story worth a damn.

Ed Boon, If you're reading this, wake up and realise that your livelyhood is being trashed by JOHN VOGEL.

Indeed. Though I do feel lighter now that I got that MvC2 trivia off my mind.


No one can say for certain, but I don't think Vogel's role extends that far over the story. The premise and the outcome were probably Boon's call, and Vogel's job was to construct a plot around Boon's ideas. Speculating further, the first draft was probably much better than what we got, but the producers and programmers took a scalpel to it and made it more practical on their end. That wouldn't explain the deeper problems I guess, but it does explain things like why Smoke was dumb enough to mistake Mileena for Kitana or why the tournaments didn't have formal brackets.

I'm just saying the hate for Vogel is premature.

The devs have to put their data in the game so you can fight against them. Leaving characters who are on the disk off the character select screen doesn't make a whole lot of sense. What does it accomplish? It's not really saving them time or improving their ability to work on the newbies at all, because they're still working on the old characters. They're just not letting the player use things that're in the game. I just don't see what's good about that, where is the up-side to having a full dozen unplayable hidden characters?

Mortal Kombat Deception.

Several of the characters who didn't advance to the game were fightable I'm the story mode.


Mortal Kombat (2011).

Goro, Kintaro, and Shao Kahn, as well as characters created exclusively for the Challenge Tower (Director, Rutuu, etc...) remain unplayable in the game.

Were these pointless to you?


Off-topic, but Rutuu should be expanded on. I wanna know more about this evil spirit.

Oh wait, are you saying the dead characters should remain playable but not participate in the story or...I've become confused.

They left out all their special moves though, presumably to have room on the disk for everything. And that shit sucked too, I hated it when I played that game, knowing there were characters on the disk but I couldn't use them.

I can understand it when death legitimately takes a character off the board in the plot, like Quan Chi and Shang Tsung, or Kabal stabbing Mavado, or Hsu Hao, some characters were meant to stay dead if it hadn't been for Ed going "let's make another Trilogy next!" But when the game deliberately tells us "They were brought back to serve such and such", and then that character isn't actually in the game? That doesn't make fucking sense.

Unless they literally didn't have any space left for more data (which the additions made on Gamecube and the PSP suggest otherwise), then every character they had in Konquest mode who was part of the plot rather than taken out of it (i.e. Onaga's slaves) should've been on the select screen. I was a lot madder about it before the PSP version came out, but even then, Kung Lao, Sonya, and Cage are still sitting on the shelf in the final version of the game, a vital part of Onaga's army but not actually on the roster, so even though they're supposed to be protecting him, you don't fight them on the ladder? That doesn't add up design-wise. Why are Noob and Smoke the sub-boss anyway, when they're not even connected to Onaga? It's always kinda infuriated me.
And that same exact circumstance applies to every single character who died in MK9 except possibly Noob Saibot, Shang Tsung, Motaro, and Shao Kahn. (And even then, it should apply to Motaro, he only didn't show up in Hell because of NRS's chronic centaur-animating problems.)
And as for your other example, Bosses aren't playable because they're unbalanced. And Director, Stuntman, etc. ain't even characters.

Last time I checked, the story was written by Alexander Barrentine and Dominic Cianciolo.

Alexander Barrentine is the lead software engineer; Dominic Cianciolo is the cinematic director. It makes sense they'd be credited for the story writing as they handled the implementation, editing, and (most likely) the voice/motion capture directing.

Nonetheless, John Vogel is given top listing in the credits under the story segment (above Barrentine and Cianciolo). If the other guys actually did have a hand in the initial script, it wasn't to the same extent as Vogel.

Well I remember Ed crediting them for the writing. Let me locate the tweet/

Yeah, I can't remember them all either but various twitter/interview comments and credits also left me with the impression that Vogel's role over the writing has become supervisory rather than hands-on in this gen.
I've been saying for a while that's probably why the continuity didn't match up, because Vogel never had a problem with remembering what happened in MK1 thru 3 when he was writing Deadly Alliance and Deception. You don't just magically go from being the guy who wrote the two most cohesive stories in the series to being the guy who gets all the facts mixed up all on your own.
...Well okay, maybe if your name is "Frank Miller" or "Jeph Loeb", you can lose it that quick. But it's not normal behavior in a writer.