some combination thereof – I’m finding that my version of closing the distance and then getting a hit in kind of blows unless I had a pretty clear idea of how to chain that attack going in, which is a higher bar to clear than I’m used to, but I’m also brand new so fair enough.
yeah, it’s actually the mere existence of the “perform all three inputs before your character has gotten the first attack out” combos that have me spooked
those seem like pure overhead to me
Okay, yeah. That’s the thing I was talking about earlier that I too had to get used to. Single hits have their place but I’d say the first thing you have to get used to is thinking about your “normal attacks” as the full combo strings. This is one of those things that is kind of pulled from 3D fighters.
So rather than looking for a standing jab or crouching kick to poke at someone with, look for a combo string to poke at someone with. Something that feels like it has good range on the first hit and isn’t too punishable on the last hit. And just commit to the full thing whenever you use it; think of it as a single move. If you hit, you get your damage. If you miss, maybe the second or third hit will reach far enough to at least make your opponent block. Otherwise you might get punished. Think about if you need to be closer to your opponent next time or choose a better moment to attack.
Training lets you “pin” moves from your movelist to the UI so you can always see them onscreen, so I pin all of the full combo strings a character has so I can see them all at once. Then I try to get feel of their ranges and speeds, seeing which ones could possibly work as any of the utilities I listed a couple of posts above. Once I’ve got two or three strings down I’ll just stick with those when I’m first learning a character. Basically just using 2 or 3 moves that let me hit someone safely.
I’ve noticed that from a design perspective “Krushing Blows” are a great design mechanic because it helps you internalize your positioning and awareness on top of the bonus. I went with Jade for a while last night and I was realizing that I could use her 1,2,4 string as a safe way to move around the screen if you whiff because it has a pretty good sweep range. But also because the requirement for the KB is missing the first hit but connecting the second two. So your first hit has good frame advantage so you can cancel block it if you think they are going to block the last two hits. You can use it to get in with the long range strike from the staff and activate the Krushing Blow. There’s a lot of interesting things you can do with it. I’m not super great at memorising combos in any game but it’s interesting to see how the path to getting a Krushing Blow is influencing my memory.
Also they just did a stream admitting the towers of time are a bit bullshit so they lowered the values on their end and a proper patch is rolling out this/next week along with 500,000 koins and other premium items as an apology. Also never noticed it but using Time Crystals is super limited since you can only buy rotating gear and they explained the Krypt randomises boxes per player, not whats in them. There’s a lot they should have explained before launch.
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amazing
I think this could use a setting between normal and hard at least for the story mode if that’s your preferred way of getting acquainted with the characters, the AI goes a little too obviously easy on you on normal and hard is like “impossible to win without practicing your moveset”
I really like how transparently (and optionally!) technical it is though, it’s less heavy-handed than DBFZ and less strip-mined than modern street fighter
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OK Kung Lao is my guy at this point
I adore this tbh and it’s funny because I was entirely unaware of Mortal Kombat gradually becoming objectively good, it’s true to the original stiffness and '90s tude while feeling extremely fair and tight
all the different buddy pairings in the story mode are great
who wants to play with me?
I’m up for playing whenever I’m home, although I’ll be at a comic convention Friday through Sunday this weekend.
Also apparently the Day One patch that rebalanced many characters from the pre-release version of the game hasn’t been applied to the PC version yet for some reason, but you can see the balance changes here: https://testyourmight.com/threads/mortal-kombat-11-patch-notes.69188/
that’s OK, I’ll be watching too much hockey all month. ping me if you see me playing!
Two things happened: turns out I had more money than I thought and this game was only 38€ for me on wingamestore because I had bonus points. So now I can test my might awww yeah
It’s kind of crazy that I bought Tekken 7, Soul Calibur 6 AND MK11 when I used to not be a fighting game fan at all. But it’s a new golden age for the genre and I wouldn’t want to miss it
Glad to see that the move to 3d hasn’t completely killed the idea of “Crowd of people showing up for a single animation sequence as a gag” in fightmans (this could be a good GO topic?)
I’d take DBFZ over SC6 but yeah the other two are just full of enthusiasm and super playable
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Why has there never been a SamSho character with a proper authentic chonmage hairdo
Looking like The Kollector might be my boy. He’s such a fun and unique character because of his literal bag of tricks and he’s great at keeping people at range. Especially since a lot of his Krushing Blows are range based and you can really screw around with people by holding and cancelling mace bash. There’s a super nasty sweep range combo I found with 4,4,3 but you can special cancel out of it to D,B+3 on regular load out for a super nasty 7-8 hit (Cancel on the second 4 if you aren’t confident) or D,B+4 if you have his lantern draw in. Otherwise his flame magic (I think its B+2, 1,1). My current variation replaces his Bola with a chakram, bag bomb (really useful) and lantern draw and I find it’s really neat. I might take it to casuals later and see (Because Ranked is pre-set variations only but most people are playing casuals including pros so they can use variations because it’s dumb)
Whoever rolled that towers of time that reversed controls if you tried rush in earlier can go do one though. That game modifier is NEVER fun.
yeah that whole mode just seems comically bad, I can only imagine how a person who sits down in front of it determine to unlock all 60 cosmetic doodads for every character would feel
they give you the non-undead skins for all of the canonically dead characters just be completing each of their tutorials (which are actually hugely useful and teach you how to play each of them) which is good enough for me
Kollector is probably the best designed character they came up with in years, or maybe ever. It’s a shame I don’t like him! He reminds me of Voldo in that I just find him repulsive on a deep level that I can’t explain. But I have to give credit where credit is due. Awesome character.
I’m just now going through the tutorial. I have no clue which character I’ll play! Obvious choice would be Liu Kang. I used to like him and Scorpion the most when I was little and he’s the Bruce Lee character. But we’ll see. I’m excited to see what kinds of playstyles are supported in this game.
the story is really good for getting to sample different characters except you might find yourself hopping in and out to practice them because the tutorial tips are extremely useful and you can’t really just play intuitively above normal difficulty so you wind up stumbling through or not. I kind of wish they’d found a more organic way to introduce them than that but it’s a fairly minor complaint in practice because both modes individually are so well done and you can improve quickly
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is the postprocessing on the pre fight animations fucking up the beards for anyone else
Scorpion and sub zero look airbrushed
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I also think it’s sweet how much of the time travel plot involves all the protagonists’ future selves having been Hardened and needing to learn to love again from the 1994 cast
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