This article originally ran under a different banner/website in May of 2019 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.
HEAR YE!!! HEAR YE!!! In the current 21st century, the games industry is diseased, polluted, and overpopulated. To combat this trend, games have been infused with an artificial grind. The grind was designed to hook players into games and get them invested. A player was less likely to walk away from a game if they had invested weeks into it. On top of that, some players might be willing to pay to skip the grind. This artificial grind had been added into games like Star Wars Battlefront II, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, Fallout 76, Anthem, and the most recent title, Mortal Kombat 11.
Mortal Kombat 11, taking a page out of the mobile gaming playbook, has four different currencies: coins, hearts, souls, and Time crystals. With a roster of 25 characters, 60 skins per character, 30 pieces of gear, and two fatalities to unlock, I can only fathom the amount of time required to unlock everything. Of course, you can purchase time crystals with real cash, just like mobile games. You can unlock items in the Krypt, but many players have expressed grievances over the difficulty of the Krypt; saying it can only be beaten with single-use items that cost currency you gain from the Krypt. Resulting in a vicious spiral of grinding.
Many different numbers outlining the time or cash you need to spend have been floating around and disputed. Personally, I don’t think the amount matters, the simple fact is Mortal Kombat 11 is designed to be a grind similar to many AAA games that hope to gain more money off of players. The multiple currencies and unlocks have become so common in the mobile market that I have no doubt you know at least one mobile game that uses these tactics. These slimy schemes are seeping into the AAA live services to wring more cash from players. Much like Shadow of War’s grind, it is placed there to grind a player’s patience down and to tempt them to spend more money. Now NetherRealm is aware of the issue and is attempting to fix it. While that’s good, but I must question why Mortal Kombat 11 came out in such a grueling state. Either NetherRealm never tested the Krypt or they did and wanted to encourage the grind.
I always imagined players becoming digital slaves meant to be grinding away on games, but it turns out the grass is not greener on the other side. Developers at NetherRealm Studios are being told to do as much work as their player base. On April 26, PC Gamer published an article outlining the crunch period plaguing NetherRealm Studio. PC Gamer was able to get testament from former employees who were willing to speak out against NetherRealm Studio:
“I took one day off between Jan 1 [2011] and the day 1 patch was approved. It was my birthday, and it was on a Sunday, so it was ok if I was just on call. I was allowed to go to a friends’ wedding (on call of course) on a Saturday night, after working an 8-hour shift first. Those were the only two days I didn’t work from at least 10 am to at least midnight. We were all doing this. I mean, except the bosses, of course, who would leave after dinner.”
-James Longstreet, former software engineer at NetherRealm
Once again, I must stand before you shouting about bosses, like the ones Longstreet describes, who have no place in this industry and should not be tolerated. Much like the wallets of their player bases, the games industry would like to think their workforce is infinite, but I can assure you it isn’t. Eventually, they will run out of people who are willing to be taken advantage of, and they will be left unable to create a grindy game designed to fleece more money out of players. Crunch cannot be tolerated because it will lead to the eventual end of the industry.
Here is the craziest thing: crunching to meet yearly releases does not benefit players nor developers. I didn’t say the games industry was overpopulated for no reason. Even if I wanted to squeeze Mortal Kombat 11 into my review list, I don’t know how I would have time to. THERE IS A MONSTROUS AMOUNT OF GAME RELEASES THAT THE THOUGHT OF ATTEMPTING TO COVER ALL OF THEM KEEPS ME UP AT NIGHT. We are drowning in games right now. From Days Gone to Katana Zero to Close to the Sun, May has only just begun and I already feel like I am behind the eight ball for reviews. I also want to try Rage and Layers of Fear to better prepare myself for their squeals that are coming out. Of course, have a laundry list of PS4 to try and get to. Now, I am not here to complain about my back catalog, but I am merely trying to point out that delaying Mortal Kombat 11 would not have devastated me nor other players. I am sure my back catalog is no longer than other player’s.
I would also argue that delaying Mortal Kombat 11 would allow developers to make a higher quality experience. I am not denying the joy one receives from watching Scorpion rip Sub-Zero in half in Mortal Kombat 11, but I think with more time and less pressure some features could have been better fleshed out. For example, if the developers at NetherRealm didn’t feel like they had a gun to their head, they might have been able to take the time to properly playtest the Krypt and see how unruly it felt. Maybe they could see how having four different types of currencies makes the game feel like it belongs on the Apple store. Maybe they could see Mortal Kombat 11 is not fun when it is a grind. At the end of the day, it hard to make decisions that benefit your game and its players when you working from 10 am until midnight for years on end.
That’s the tricky part. If there are no mobile-style microtransactions and the game isn’t rushed out to meet quarterly requirements, how will the shareholders be happy? At the end of the day, games aren’t made for our enjoyment or an expression of the developer’s creativity. They are made to make the rich richer. This is why more games have adopted mobile-style currencies. This is why crunch is an epidemic not only among Telltale Games, Bioware, Epic Games, and of course NetherRealm Studio. It doesn’t benefit the customers nor the developers, only the dragons at the top. These dragons at the top have succeeded in wrapping games into virtual slave pits not just for us the players, but the worker who just wanted to do something creative with the media.
I CALL FOR NOT ONLY PLAYERS, BUT DEVELOPERS TO CAST ASIDE THEIR VIRTUAL SHACKLES AND RAISE UP AGAINST GRIND. Games like Mortal Kombat 11 are not welcomed. Bosses who leave before their employees are not welcomed. Publishers who have wormed microtransactions similar to mobile games into AAA titles are not welcomed. The Dragons of Warner Brothers Interactive are not welcomed. If we do not remove these bad actors from the media we love, then all I can say is the end is nigh.