Where do I start?
A full price £60 game that launched with no basic features like crossplay, riddled with black screens, desyncs that ruin every game mode is probably a good place.
Let's do a short comparison SF6 during pre launch beta + Full crossplay + Flawless netcode +Wifi filter +practice while searcing for matches + handful of bugs were found and were fixed within 48 hours
MK1 on full launch -no crossplay -worst netcode in the gaming world bar none
They also completely ignored all of the feedback that 11 got because they kept the 2 worst things ever to be implemented in any video games ever.
1: Fatal blow, a cheap mechanic that rewards people for losing by granting them access to a cinemtaic, therefore unbreakable 30%+ attack. Pre launch they lied and said that the armour wasn't instant so they werent free win buttons like in mk11, but between the beta test and full relese they buffed fatal blows so they are exactly the same as 11.
2: Towers of time, this is inexplicably how cany anybody, let alone a company that has been "developing" games for 3 decades think it is a good idea to take video games, a purely visual form of escapism and put "modifiers" in it that make the screen completely black so the player cant see whats going on? Well nrs have done just that yet again, but it's even worse than it sounds. In 11 there were monotonous rotating towers, in 1 there is "invasion" mode which is those same monotonous, modifier ruined towers but now you cant just enter a tower, you have to control a low quality flash game looking sprite of your character, run around an empty world, stuck on rails and play what can only be described as a mobile game in between getting to towers Also on this same point they have made the modifiers even dumber than mk11 because they are more consistent, in mk11 blindness was common, in 1 it is constant as is giving the ai armour so you cannot even make use of the tedious matches to practice combos and timing because it is literally not possible to combo the armoured enemies, even if the screen wasnt black.
There are so many things worth mentioning I am struggling to decide what to write in the given character limit in this site.
It is objectively and easily proven to be a worse game in every measurable manner than games from 21 years ago from this same company and there isn't any justification for it, they are just lazy and dont care. Ed boon hates mk but won't drop it because it's guaranteed profit but at the same time neither he or his employees will even pretend to care enough to put in any amount of bare minimum effort, resulting in what we have here.
A full price £60 game that launched with no basic features like crossplay, riddled with black screens, desyncs that ruin every game mode is probably a good place.
Let's do a short comparison SF6 during pre launch beta + Full crossplay + Flawless netcode +Wifi filter +practice while searcing for matches + handful of bugs were found and were fixed within 48 hours
MK1 on full launch -no crossplay -worst netcode in the gaming world bar none
- no wifi filter, forcing you to accept ranked matches with connections bad enough to guarantee drops
- microtransactions included on launch, you cant play against other platforms, you cant have 1 full match without disconnecting but you can spend £20 to buy a helmet that is a slightly different shade of silver for 1 characte
They also completely ignored all of the feedback that 11 got because they kept the 2 worst things ever to be implemented in any video games ever.
1: Fatal blow, a cheap mechanic that rewards people for losing by granting them access to a cinemtaic, therefore unbreakable 30%+ attack. Pre launch they lied and said that the armour wasn't instant so they werent free win buttons like in mk11, but between the beta test and full relese they buffed fatal blows so they are exactly the same as 11.
2: Towers of time, this is inexplicably how cany anybody, let alone a company that has been "developing" games for 3 decades think it is a good idea to take video games, a purely visual form of escapism and put "modifiers" in it that make the screen completely black so the player cant see whats going on? Well nrs have done just that yet again, but it's even worse than it sounds. In 11 there were monotonous rotating towers, in 1 there is "invasion" mode which is those same monotonous, modifier ruined towers but now you cant just enter a tower, you have to control a low quality flash game looking sprite of your character, run around an empty world, stuck on rails and play what can only be described as a mobile game in between getting to towers Also on this same point they have made the modifiers even dumber than mk11 because they are more consistent, in mk11 blindness was common, in 1 it is constant as is giving the ai armour so you cannot even make use of the tedious matches to practice combos and timing because it is literally not possible to combo the armoured enemies, even if the screen wasnt black.
There are so many things worth mentioning I am struggling to decide what to write in the given character limit in this site.
- Graphics are a massive downgrade from 11
- PS4 didn't get it but switch did, even though 95% of nrs player base are on ps4
- PC port was outsourced as cheap as possible and given to the same company who in 4 years never fixed any of the bugs in mk11 on pc
- it runs at 30fps and has frame drops, it factually has worse performance and runs at worse frame rates than psp games
- there are no rooms, so trying to coordinate matching with people you know/frequently play against is much more difficult than it needs to be
- They removed the ability to pin moves to the screen so if you are labbing a new character you constantly have to pause and scroll through 1 menu and 2 sub menus to find the move
- the frame data is hidden in the movelilst and there is no option to save it to open by default, so every single time you open the menu you need to unhide frame data
- at the moment the claimed frame data in the moveslist are wrong across the board
- you cannot practice while waiting for matches, which combined with nrs cheap servers means you will spend on average 15 minutes watching a loading screen for every 3 minutes of actual gameplay
- it is a 96gb install but 95gb of that is locked on the server side, which means when the cheap servers go down, which they do every 5 minutes you lose access to 99.9% of a game that you paid for
- there is no crossplay at launch
- no crossplay for pc ever
- even without crossplay the servers cant even handle the low amount of traffic and game drops are very very very common
- "customisation" is a blatant lie, only 2 items can be changed per character outfit and weapon and even then what nrs call an "outfit" is actually just a slight colour palete change
- ^ in order to get those "different" cosmetics you need to grind for hours in the invasions mode, then go to the "shrine" which is a loading screen where you use 1000 tokens at a time and each time you do you have to watch a 45 second loading screen of a dragon statue slightly lighting up and then generating 1 rng item. You cannot speed this up, cannot spend more than 1k at once, cannot auto spend, you need to do it manually
- the playable characters are watered down and utterly one dimensional, there is no variety whatsoever, raiden for example has 1 string which serves every purpose, it opens people up, launches, extends combos, ends combos, punishes and is safe on block so there is no reason to ever use any other string he has so both playing him or playing against him is already so boring it's not even fair to classify it as "gameplay"
- it is objectively the most unbalanced fighting game in existence, as always the nrs dev favourites got loaded with every possible strength ( fast attacks, safe strings, high damage, versatile specials, long range punishes, easy combos, easy conversions etc etc) while the rest of the characters got few to none of those.
- it has less gameplay and less creativity than the games nrs were producing in 2002, fewer game modes, no mercy, no animalities, no babalities, the fatalities are the worst they've ever been, just skeletons left right and centre no detail in the models or animations at all, no motor kombat, no create a fighter.
It is objectively and easily proven to be a worse game in every measurable manner than games from 21 years ago from this same company and there isn't any justification for it, they are just lazy and dont care. Ed boon hates mk but won't drop it because it's guaranteed profit but at the same time neither he or his employees will even pretend to care enough to put in any amount of bare minimum effort, resulting in what we have here.