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WB Games Strikes Again: MK11 single player (non-story) progression is reportedly agonizingly slow/difficult

MadLaughter

MadLaughter

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
13,093
From the people who brought you such awesome stuff as:
-Retailer exclusive costumes
-$40 season pass of QUESTIONABLE quality
-Easy Fatality Coins
-Shadow of War orcs in lootboxes
-Steelbooks for days
-Ports so bad you'd prefer a virus

Mortal Kombat 11 has a mode called 'Towers of Time'. Each tower is a series of fights with different modifiers and rewards for completion. This is similar to the multiverse mode in Injustice 2, but it sounds like the MK11 towers are much, much more difficult and tedious than the multiverse ladders in Injustice 2.

Below are some quotes from people who have played them:

2) The towers have inconsistent difficulty spikes, and some of the worst balanced fights in fighting game history. I know a hard fight from bad game design. This is the latter. Trust me I'm not throwing this term around lightly. I've played old SNK bosses, I've done the MK9 challenge tower, cleared IJ2 multiverse bosses, and cleared SFV extreme survival. All of those are downright friendly compared to what we have here.

Most of the fights in the Towers of time are pushovers if you've been playing fighting games seriously for a while. They're just moderate difficulty CPU battles where the CPU does 3-4 hit combos and occasionally reads your inputs. But then there are occasional fights that make you question your reality. Try fighting a Kano while your normal and special move damage is halved, your Fatal blow damage is nerfed by 75%, while the Kano calls in an unblockable air strike that drops 4 explosives that do 10% of your health each, and also a single missile that reverses your controls, and both of these on a 5 second cool down. You tell me that is good game design.
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Dphex said:
so, these towers of time are a shadow of the great Injustice 2 Multiverse, i think i have played 7 or 8 towers by now and all my will to continue is zapped...

negative effects only applied to the player, not the enemy, ridiculous matches like 2 characters with extra health and effects against you with a single healthbar, the consumables don´t help at all, difficulty spikes every few matches, fucked up modifiers all the way. this stuff seems like it wasn´t even playtested. this is so much worse than the Injustice 2 Multiverse, i can´t believe it...

man i am annoyed by the game at the moment, the core fighting is good, everything else is a total mess so far..progression, mandatory online stuff, bad towers which should be the heart of the single player mode....

i think this will turn out as quite a bummer for many people, i wonder what happened, maybe they rushed this game out of the door..i don´t have another explanation for this mess.

there is not a single thing in this game which is motivating, it is all there to slow you down, to cripple your experience and to make you fork out more money. i think i am done with any games Warner Bros might put out in the future, i won´t support this predatory nonsense anymore. won´t buy any Kombat Pass for this game for sure, already thinking about selling the game tbh, no interest to take part in this time consuming bullshit and i don´t go to tournaments, i just wanted a nice fighting game which can be played solo, Injustice 2 i played for months but this here...i don´t know at the moment
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Problem with the whole stuff is the game is constantly throwing sticks between the players legs.

you buy an character specific tower set which consists of 4 or 5 towers for 25000 Koins. In those towers they want you to have accumulated 50 uppercuts or 50 throws, so you have to grind this out first before you can tackle the character specific towers. yay!

you do a normal tower of time, it takes a long time and you get 10.000 koins and a few consumables for the playing, it isn´t even guaranteed that you get something cosmetic. yay!

i am sitting here with a Sonya that has in total 15 Skins, 4 intros, winning poses 2 fatalities and stuff and there is no guarantee at all to unlock something specific, i see the same intro, the same winning pose and the same fatality the whole time. the game is crippled essentially because you will never see those cosmetics in a reasonable amount of time.

so that is where these crystals come into play later. they want people to buy those crystals or play this game till your beard is long and grey.

people saying this is fine are not seeing the problem, this is a full price game with additional paid DLC characters and they treat you like playing a free mobile game. it is awful and it makes no fun. they should give out those cosmetics at a steady pace...

this is just awful, if the base game was 30 bucks and it was so stingy, well would suck but would be an explanation, for a full price game this is all the disgusting shit going on with games these days rolled into one nice package.
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https://testyourmight.com/threads/i...the-single-player-grind-minor-spoilers.69102/

Overall, I'm quite mixed on Towers of Time. The amount of work you need to put in to clear a whole island vs the reward you get for it sometimes doesn't seem worth it. Would I like to spend 2 hours to clear a whole island in order to get 2 skins, 2 gear pieces, and a couple augments? I'm not sure. In Injustice 2, I could clear one whole character multiverse event in 40-50 minutes and get a full epic set, few motherboxes, coins, and character gear specials. Oh, and I didn't even explain the consumables.
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This is the most grindy and padded the Krypt had ever been. While this game does not have real money lootboxes, the Krypt might as well be a loot box wet dream.
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This is my most anticipated game in a long while, I put ~100 hours into Injustice 2, I've been watching the NRS streams, watched their launch trailer 4-ish times at this point.. but it sounds like they've taken a number of steps back and gotten far more stingy.
 
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Yog-Sothoth

Yog-Sothoth

Member
Oct 1, 2018
3,225
Yeah went from Day 1 to wait for reviews/impressions and MK is one of my favorite franchises ever.

The fact that almost everything (including offline stuff) seems to be tied to a server is the killing blow for me.

Some mobile devs have more scruples than WB.
 
Pachinko

Pachinko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
954
Canada
This sounds bad but a thought crossed my mind just now.... to discourage playing games early , developers could easily make a lot of features a total slog until day 1 to make sure people who don't download a day 1 patch (or hell even a day -2 patch) will have to work their butts off to unlock stuff OR they can just wait until that update makes things "normal".

I doubt that's the case here though.
 
alosarjos

alosarjos

Member
Oct 27, 2017
364
Have to say, I played Shadow of War from Day1 and never feeled like I needed the orcs lootboxes... Has a blast with the game. The only thing I don't like (They will probably do it here too) is how they have great deals for the "Gold version" but not for the Season Pass...
 
OP
OP
MadLaughter

MadLaughter

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
13,093
Pachinko said:
This sounds bad but a thought crossed my mind just now.... to discourage playing games early , developers could easily make a lot of features a total slog until day 1 to make sure people who don't download a day 1 patch (or hell even a day -2 patch) will have to work their butts off to unlock stuff OR they can just wait until that update makes things "normal".

I doubt that's the case here though.
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I'll totally eat crow if they've got a patch ready that swoops in and cleans it all up, but reviewers already have the game, so it'd be wild if the reviewers had to review a much worse version
 
Garlador

Garlador

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
14,131
If it remains bad post-launch, let NRS know.

No studio is blameless, but NRS does listen to their fans and players more often than not. If the balance is detrimental to the experience, I imagine tweaks will be made.

Hoping the big day-one patch alleviates some of it too.
 
NeoRaider

NeoRaider

Member
Feb 7, 2018
7,332
This was my biggest fear and what i was expecting to happen. I am very disappointed but not surprised at all.
 

SpokkX

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
2,495
What are "mk towers"?

I have not enjoyed an mk since mk shaolin monks on ps2. Loved that game but mk singleplayer since then seems to still be battle after battle?
 
Adamska

Adamska

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
7,042
MadLaughter said:
Easy Fatality Coins
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I mean, how is this a bad thing exactly? It always appeared to me as a way to profit off of lazy people who can't be arsed having the fatality input in close proximity to them during online play.

Also, OT, I guess it remains to be seen if progression is as hard as it's being reported. I wouldn't believe any knee jerk reactions right now, considering the game's not even out yet.
 

Deleted member 3058

User requested account closure
Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,728
Was the Injustice 2 multi-verse well liked? I thought it was a huuge waste of time and drag on the overall experience so if this is even worse then..
 
Sgt. Demblant

Sgt. Demblant

Self-requested ban
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
7,030
France
I remember thinking that Injustice 2 was strangely generous at the time.

To the point where I couldn't understand why anybody would ever need to spend money on motherboxes or whatever it was that they were selling, aside from the characters. Maybe WB had the same thought lol.

We'll see, maybe they'll rebalance some of that stuff?
I was thinking of pre-ordering the game today. I'm still excited but it can't hurt to wait for the reviews.
 
2CL4Mars

2CL4Mars

Member
Nov 9, 2018
1,710
Actually in my country it's 45 dollars to the normal price of 60 dollars, so in many online stores, popular ones to it's 45$.

Saving 15 dollars is pretty good so I can forgive it's many short comings even if I don't like it them.
 
Reinhard

Reinhard

Member
Oct 27, 2017
6,592
This is from the same publisher that made the final portion of Shadow of War a super grind to encourage loot box purchases. Injustice 2 being fair and not too much of a grind seems the exception rather than the rule for WB Games nowadays.
 
Mass Effect

Mass Effect

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 31, 2017
16,763
Bad PC port AGAIN?

Lmao wtf

Yeah, all these issues say to me is "wait for the GOTY edition." That's what I did with X.
 
RecRoulette

RecRoulette

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
26,044
It's weird, I heard nothing but good things about Injustice 2's system (even in the OP lol) but over the last few weeks I heard some of the horror stories like folks playing since launch and still missing pieces to complete a set or even abilities.

I was buying this anyway so it doesn't change my opinion, but I hope the system isn't too bad for those folks on the fence. The bit about "seeing the same intro and win pose" is whatever, because that's how it was in MKX right?
 
Lunaray

Lunaray

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,731
Despite having no goodwill towards WB/NRS after their bad PC port and lack of communication for months over whether it was getting fixed, I was getting more and more interested in MK11. Now I'm out again. I'll probably get it a couple of year from now.
 
Garlador

Garlador

Banned
Oct 30, 2017
14,131
Mass Effect said:
Bad PC port AGAIN?

Lmao wtf

Yeah, all these issues say to me is "wait for the GOTY edition." That's what I did with X.
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Lunaray said:
Despite having no goodwill towards WB/NRS after their bad PC port and lack of communication for months over whether it was getting fixed, I was getting more and more interested in MK11. Now I'm out again. I'll probably get it a couple of year from now.
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There is no evidence MK11 is a bad PC port. They were merely mentioning WB has churned out many bad PC ports before.

MK11 on PC is being handled by QLOC, who fixed MKX and did an outstanding job on Injustice 2. They're good. The PC port should be FINE.
 
Cordy

Cordy

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,325
Already hyped for the game due to the fan service, gameplay, graphics and of course the story. This however is a shot at it. Guess it won't be as perfect as can be, figured something would give it a problem.

I'm not sure how much time I spent on the towers in MKX but I know I had fun with them in MK9. Definitely not doing any micro-transaction stuff in this game that's for sure. Absolutely not.

They need to address some of these concerns on Monday's Kombat Cast.
 
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Manu

Manu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
17,120
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cordy said:
Already hyped for the game due to the fan service, gameplay, graphics and of course the story. This however is a shot at it. Guess it won't be as perfect as can be, figured something would give it a problem.

I'm not sure how much time I spent on the towers in MKX but I know I had fun with them in MK9. Definitely not doing any micro-transction stuff in this game that's for sure. Absolutely not.

They need to address some of these concerns on today's Kombat Cast.
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Next Kombat Kast is next Monday.
 
ZangBa

ZangBa

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,040
Shao Kahn being cut out the roster to be sold as a preorder bonus is bullshit enough. I don't want hear any defense for this, he's in the story.
 
Mórríoghain

Mórríoghain

Member
Nov 2, 2017
5,144
"there is not a single thing in this game which is motivating, it is all there to slow you down, to cripple your experience and to make you fork out more money."

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Salty Rice

Salty Rice

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
8,612
Pancake City
Eh i need to experience it for myself. I dont mind grinding for stuff instead of getting handed out like candy to everyone.

Its like expecting to unlock all Overwatch skins after a day.
 
ShinobiBk

ShinobiBk

One Winged Slayer
Member
Dec 28, 2017
10,121
Pachinko said:
This sounds bad but a thought crossed my mind just now.... to discourage playing games early , developers could easily make a lot of features a total slog until day 1 to make sure people who don't download a day 1 patch (or hell even a day -2 patch) will have to work their butts off to unlock stuff OR they can just wait until that update makes things "normal".

I doubt that's the case here though.
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Absolutely not. The game is out for review now. This is not when you want to be pulling stunts like that.
 
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