Mortal Kombat VS DC: Midway Interview

Midway's Senior Producer Hans Lo reveals the secrets of the DC Universe tie-in.

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Kikizo: How detailed is the narrative? Would you compare it with the relatively brief cut scenes in Dead or Alive, for example?

Lo: No, I think our storyline is one of the deeper and more complex ones - we have about two and a half to three hours of cinematic content that was really well done by our in-house cinematics group...

Kikizo: Is that pre-rendered?

Lo: All pre-rendered, except the last line of the story mode goes in-engine and goes straight into the fight. So two guys will be arguing and we're loading up underneath the movie the entire time, and then it seamlessly cuts to Scorpion saying "And now I'm going to kick your ass!" and then it's time for the fight. And you're like, "Oh shit, I was just watching it!"

We spent a lot of time working out the tech and how to get it from pre-rendered into in-engine, and it really works well - it's like a camera cut... It's like fight, cut scene, cut scene, fight, all the way across.

Kikizo: Let's move onto the gameplay - I'm a fighting game fan, more of a Virtua Fighter kind of guy, which is one end of the spectrum...

Lo: Yeah, it's so technical...

Kikizo: And I recently interviewed the guy who made FaceBreaker, which is basically the opposite of Virtua Fighter - there's a rock-paper-scissors logic to it but that's as complex as it gets. Where does Mortal Kombat versus DC fit on that scale?

Lo: I think MK is right in the middle, depending on the kind of player that plays it. It's very easy to pick up but it's impossible to master. We added a lot of layers into it, especially with our Pro moves. Pro moves are like enhanced versions of Super moves, so for instance with Sonia - she has her basic ring toss which is like down, forward and square, but if you do down, forward and square and then on the frame of the first ring coming out you do down, forward and square again she'll fire two of them, and each character has a different capability of doing these Pro moves.

So the more advanced and more experienced players are going to have a hard time figuring their timing out perfectly, but it's going to give them a hell of an advantage when they're playing against other people online. At the same time, a twelve-year-old kid could come in, and as long as he knows how to do a fireball motion he's going to be able to do maybe 70 per cent of the Special moves in this game, because we've made sure to map them to down and forward or down and back, plus one of the attack buttons. Because that's what people intuitively do when they're playing fighting games.

So it's very easy to pick up - we've made the combo system a lot easier, you're able to splice special moves into the middle of your combos very easily... So like I said, easy to pick up but almost impossible to master. I think we're right in the middle.

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