Since its release last year, Mortal Kombat X has made a fortune and has taken the FGC  by storm. More gruesome fatalities, even better bone breaking  X-Rays and with the welcome return of Brutalities, this game looked better than ever. It has even gained its own seasonal tournament amongst ESL with a prize pool of $100,000. Unfortunately there were a few shocking points about this game, but not so dire as to render the game unplayable.

Firstly comes the old age question of returning characters in Mortal Kombat. The MK universe is known for having characters die and then resurrect later on in the series, as well as having events where time travelling occurs. So it’s essentially a mystery most of the time as to who is going to be in the game. MKX took out a fair few of the ‘veteran’ characters and replaced them with brand new characters such as Cassie Cage, Jacqui Briggs, Kung Jin etc. This did not go down well at all with the entire player base as some of the most popular characters had been removed such as Kabal, Smoke, Noob Saibot, Cyrax, Sektor etc.

Secondly was the Netcode of the game. Now regarding the Netcode, most of America complained that the Netcode was “trash” and even made jokes that you had to unlock the Netcode in Krypt, which is where you go to unlock all the games costumes, fatalities etc. Personally speaking, the Netcode didn’t affect many matches so no complaints came from this end.

Thirdly and lastly are the infamous patches that came out every other week to “fix” the game breaking things that the players had found. Patching a game this often can be a good thing, but in a fighting game were you need to spend hours in the lab to truly master and hone your characters strengths, patches and character balancing can be off putting to say the least. Some players even dropped the characters they were ‘maining’ and even worse than this, some players even stopped playing the game all together!

But since EVO 2015, which is what every single player was practicing for since release, the popularity of MKX dropped significantly. The only people who were left playing this game were hardcore enthusiasts or people who had Dragon tattoos on either arm. The release of the Kombat Pack characters (DLC for the game) made a small increase in the number of players, but only temporarily.

Now, as of January 20th Nether Realm Studios has announced its second version of the game Mortal Kombat XL. With this comes ALL of the DLC that is going to be released for the game, along with a few brand new costumes for certain characters. But, what really grabs the attention of the players is the announcement of Kombat Pack 2 characters.

Bo’Rai Cho is one of the characters that is returning and is a part of Kombat Pack 2. He is originally an old character from the MK games released during the PS2/Xbox generation. Triborg, who is a mix of Cyrax, Sektor, Cyborg Smoke and Cyber Sub-Zero.  Yes, tri equals four in the Mortal Kombat universe. The classic horror icon Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series and finally a Xenomorph or Alien for those of you that are not familiar with the lore. The Alien is probably the most interesting character as it shown that Baraka has the Alien pop out of its chest. And following the films the Alien takes the traits of its host, so as seen in the reveal trailer for these characters, which can be seen below, the Alien has Baraka’s claws. Below is preview of the Kombat Pack 2 characters with further screenshots towards the end of the article.

With the imminent release of Street Fighter V any fighting game release within a month of this game will get decimated. Hence why NetherRealm Studios have decided to release MK XL at the beginning of March. All the characters that are included in Kombat Pack 2 will drop all on the same day. A little jab at Capcom from NRS to try and attempt to hinder some sales for SFV if they decide to release a character then, but the chances of this happening are low. However, NRS love to patch characters and nerf them which could prove difficult for them if they have multiple problems with characters all appearing up at once.

Just recently NRS announced that they will attempt to rectify the Netcode issue. Ed Boon took to Twitter and tweeted out a screenshot of MKX with the text “Peace Out” overlaid on top of it. This was of course referencing the infamous GGPO netcode which stands for Good Games Peace Out. With this, playing against a player with ludicrous ping such as 300ms will feel “lagless”. The ‘rollback’ which is the main technique used by GGPO essentially put the lag ahead of the players move which hides latency, thus creating a ‘lagless’ feel. NRS did a Beta test for this which finished just recently with extremely positive feedback, with people going as far as saying that it has the best Netcode they have experienced in any game.

MK XL launches for Playstation 4 and Xbox One on March 4th. There has been no release date announced for the PC version of MK XL. Below is the trailer you can view for the upcoming game.

Screenshots of Kombat Pack 2 Characters