mortal kombat 11 netherrealm

NetherRealm rebukes driving players to microtransactions, offers free MK11 currency and fixes

Mortal Kombat 11 may have only come out yesterday and while it has been critically well received, there has been one persistent issue sticking in most people’s craw: the progression. This unbearable grind was present in the game’s towers and Krypt and the high difficulty made getting new gear quite a process. In a recent stream, NetherRealm disputed that it was driving players to purchase microtransactions and instead detailed upcoming fixes as well as giving away some free currency.

This process has already started via the game’s “tweak vars” that can update certain aspects of the game without a patch. Last night, NetherRealm pushed out a silent update that lowered health bars of the enemies within the Towers of Time as well as made most unblockable attacks less frequent. Doing this makes these grindy towers less punishing. But that is not all.

A bigger, actual patch is slated for either this week or the very beginning of next week that will go beyond changing these numbers. It will increase currency rewards and change modifier values that couldn’t be put in the tweak var update like making unblockable rockets blockable.

As a some sort of apology, NetherRealm is giving players 500,000 Koins, 500 Hearts, 1,000 Souls, and 1,000 Time Krystals. The first three currencies can not be purchased with real money and can be used to buy certain things in the Krypt. Time Krystals can be bought with real money and can only buy things like Easy Fatality Tokens and cosmetic gear. Despite the perception of pushing players to spend real money to overcome the grind, the game does not allow you to use that real money to purchase a gameplay advantage. Tyler Lansdown, community manager at NetherRealm, said as much for the studio’s games a whole.

“This game was never designed to encourage in-game purchases,” he said. “NetherRealm does not make games that way and we never have made games that way. We do not artificially drive people towards in-game purchases.”

Lansdown even took some responsibility for the confusion surrounding the towers, lamenting the fact that they couldn’t get the towers on stream to explain them. He explained that players would know more about how to use consumables in order to better tackle the game’s steep challenges. However, he also made it clear that the towers were indeed too difficult.

Derek Kirtzic, designer at NetherRealm, also cleared up some confusion around the Krypt. Many thought the Krypt was random which made it seem like one giant loot box, something NetherRealm said the game wouldn’t have. This isn’t entirely true since the boxes are the same for every player, but they are in different places. So everyone who finishes the Krypt will have the same exact stuff at the end. Kirtzic and Lansdown also stressed multiple times that they want to make the game fun for everyone and this loop wasn’t exactly showing that in the way they intended.

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