Watched a lot of Max stream last night while I packed all my stuff for moving. It does seem beyond mega busted, but NRS does listen, and they've put out one immediate patch, and I'd be surprised if they didn't follow-up with other improvements, given how awesome they've been about being receptive to the community thus far.
I just don't think NRS actual staff will be able to avoid the corporate mandate to extort money through microtransactions. They're kinda fucked as long as this is the status quo.
That's just the thing though – the issue with the game is literally NOT even the type of grind that encourages microtransactions... at all.
The game's existing microtransactions are incredibly limited-scope AND don't offer you any ability to realistically bypass any of the grind in any way. There's no way to get around the fact that at launch it would literally have taken WEEKS to hope to get what you wanted, and MONTHS of time to be able to unlock everything.
Max covered this pretty well during his stream when he and others hit the PAINFUL grind wall on the night it released, but also summarized it again during the NRS stream. (I jumped to his summary about it not being microtransaction-based afterwards, but his comments throughout whole recap is worth it)
If you want to get a solid feeling for the actual state of things at launch and the VERY justified frustration that it was causing – Max's stream has him and the other dudes go WAY into detail on it as they were playing and hard hit the progress wall about 5 hours in to the stream and just getting beyond frustrated. They really break down all of the issues as they're trying to figure it out, and they also compare it to a bunch of different things in other games, as well as the "Unlock the Krypt" option in MKX (which I also really liked).
It's worth saying that it's already a good bit better just with the adjustments from the Kombat Kast stream, and they still haven't dropped the initial patch to fix things yet, so I'm REALLY hoping that they make things a lot better still.
$12/hour for QA testing has nothing to do with Netherrealm. That's the same everywhere. It's just a minimum wage job. It's low-skilled and absolutely anyone could do it, it's inevitable that it's gonna be paid badly.
It's a mistake to conflate that with crunch, which is often quite troubling. One is a kind of creepy psychological manipulation (often but not always), the other is just the laws of supply and demand, which it's impossible to overturn.
It's an issue that comes almost exclusively out of having poor management in software development, but that really comes as a result of upper management folk not realizing that "releasing something on time & having something that's successful upon its release" ≠ "having a successful development process" because it's hard to keep focusing on the pains when it seems like it was all worth the mad dash to the finish. That's true of any type of software development, and the issue is that because of the inflating cost of change for issue detection with development is that QA will always feel it, Engineers will feel it a little bit less, Program Managers will feel it a little less, Designers will feel it a little less, and Product Managers will feel it a little less, such that unless it's bad enough to REALLY hit all the way bak to the Product Managers who are primarily responsible for designating the release criteria & roadmap – nothing's gonna change. This is exactly why you hear about "bosses" going home for dinner while QA works constant overtime.
Source: I'm an a11y QA Engineer at a software as a service development company who doesn't suck at this too badly. (Also, I internal presentations about how to catch development process issues basically every year).
Eventually, the developer says they saw a therapist, who diagnosed them with PTSD. They attribute this to their work on MK11—not just the content of the game and having to process and discuss its violent cinematics frame by frame, but also being surrounded by the reference materials artists used for research.
“You’d walk around the office and one guy would be watching hangings on YouTube, another guy would be looking at pictures of murder victims, someone else would be watching a video of a cow being slaughtered,” they said. “The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it. And I definitely hit that point.”
I find this type of thing to be really fascinating when looking at how we'll spotlight this, but definitely gloss over it elsewhere. People training to be surgeons get made to watch a lot of really uncomfortable and disturbing things as a part of their job, because they’re going to have to be exposed to extreme sorts of horrendous suffering that most people never encounter. There are some interesting studies on trauma surgeons as well as on trainees, as well as some years-old forum posts that’re fairly interesting to go through to see how folks in the industry refer (or referred) to preparing themselves to deal with trauma vs. desensitization to it. Hell, there was even that story about the content moderators on Facebook suffering from what they had to deal with.
Back towards the artistic-focused angle: There are lots of ranges of sensitivity that people have around various depictions of gore or violence.
Anecdotally: my dad can’t watch films that have any violence where you see suffering without instantly wanting to vomit, my mom avoids any sort of violence in media overall, and I had a girl in my classes in school who used to get lightheaded in health / biology / art class when she looked at realistically detailed depictions of dissected anatomy, and another girl got a cut on her finger and literally passed out when she saw her own blood.
Personally: I'd played Mortal Kombat games, and watched Terminator & Alien films since I was like... 6? I used to draw TONS of violent-type things with exaggerated anatomy, or chestbursters. I almost instantly light-headed if I see someone getting blood drawn, or when I watched my roommate get a glass cut cleaned out and stitched at the hospital, or when I pulled a tiny piece of glass out of my hand – and was totally fine – but they weren't traumatizing for me just one of those things about how my body physically reflexively reacts. Even occasionally overseeing someone looking at pictures of people killed in accident on break.com back in the day never really hit me. I do however, remember in ye olden days of the Internets of random videos in parent directories of random servers my friends and I stumbling across a video of some dude actually getting killed. That is still the single most disturbing thing that I've ever seen, and I'd rather see thousands of different over-the-top Mortal Kombat gore than see that again
You see from about knee level, a guy's head get pushed to the ground, a booted foot stands on his head to keep him in place, and a combat knife get stabbed all the way in to the side of his neck, and the guy passes out almost instantly from pain/bloodloss. That was all of about 5 seconds, and it went from the group of us going from the silent, "I wonder what this clip is." to "Holy mother of god, that right now." None of us actually said a word, but just hard powered off the computer, walked out of the apartment and went outside and instantly started talking about something different.
So on the Mortal Kombat and game/film artist angle: For someone working as an artist on Mortal Kombat or really any type of game of film that involves replicating relatively realistic depictions of violence (exaggerated or not) – there’s definitely a range of risks just from reference materials. Especially when you’re part of a team who are all working on that, I think that it’s almost a guarantee that there will be a couple people in that group who’s normal limits are below the average of everyone else around you, and that they end up experiencing PTSD as a result. I’d bet that working on art for a game like Scorn would definitely involve the people referencing some things that many individuals would have an exceptionally tough time with, even though that’s just all for the purpose of making really Giger-esque-level uncomfortable biomechanical creature and settings, and not really hyper-realistic gore. I definitely believe that that’s something that should be well-covered and accounted for by any employer who’s making a product that potentially shows things like that, or might have a workplace with that kind of exposure.
Outside of the artists who are doing this kind of work professionally, I’d also be interested to see if people who choose to play something like Mortal Kombat or watch a realistically recreated WWII film are more prone to trigger symptoms of PTSD as a result of doing so. While Mortal Kombat is gory as all holy hell – it’s also exaggeratedly stylized and you are aware that everyone in it are fictional characters in a fictional setting. Whereas the suffering depicted in war films is meant to replicate something that we identify directly with real peoples’ experiences, but those seem to be things that are generally far less scrutinized in this sort of way. I also wonder what it's like for the people who have to do that kind of VFX or artistic work for things like that, and which ones end up being more prone to trigger PTSD.
Still a little sad that they didn't get Arnold as the voice, but glad that he at least got to pick the guy who did it. Overall the movement and movesets he has look incredible. I love the slow and meticulous way that he moves so that he feels HEAVY all the time, as well as things like the teleport. I'm not sure if the grenade is meant as one of his cores, as something new from Dark Fate, or something new just for the MK universe.
Also, that Harley Quinn skin reveal dropping now was a brilliantly timed reveal as well with the Birds of Prey trailer just dropping today as well.
After having been pissed by Sindel's sudden heel turn when she was released as DLC (namely her backstory being changed to that of a traitor to her realm), I was pleasantly surprised to see they restored her original backstory...and was brought to tears by her reunion with Kitana. And I'm a HUGE Kitana fan, no pun intended.
After having been pissed by Sindel's sudden heel turn when she was released as DLC (namely her backstory being changed to that of a traitor to her realm), I was pleasantly surprised to see they restored her original backstory...and was brought to tears by her reunion with Kitana. And I'm a HUGE Kitana fan, no pun intended.
Oh...I just now saw her turn heel again! Fuck you Shawn Kittelsen for ruining the collective childhood of my generation of MK fans! You fucking scammed me in Chapter 14!
Oh...I just now saw her turn heel again! Fuck you Shawn Kittelsen for ruining the collective childhood of my generation of MK fans! You fucking scammed me in Chapter 14!
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