Next Mortal Kombat must innovate, says Boon
New consoles a likely destination for NetherRealm's next fighter
NetherRealm Studios must add significant new ideas to the next Mortal Kombat game, according to the series' longstanding creative director Ed Boon.
Boon told CVG that his Chicago studio has not yet begun work on the successor to the highly acclaimed 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot, and suggested that work on the game is earmarked for next generation systems.
"Just philosophically, I don't think we could take the approach of doing the same thing but adding new characters in our next Mortal Kombat game," he said.
"We definitely want to do something new with it, we feel we have to introduce something into the mix."
But Boon believes that there is less opportunity to innovate if a sequel is published on the same console; An indication that the next Mortal Kombat game will arrive on hardware as yet revealed by Microsoft and Sony.
"If you introduce another edition of your game on the same console, you cannot provide a radically different experience," Boon said.
"I'm sure, if we were to do a new Mortal Kombat game on next generation systems, I think we would be able to provide dramatically different experiences."
NetherRealm, owned by media conglomerate Warner Bros., is currently finishing up production on Injustice: Gods Among Us, which is due for release in the first half of 2013.
Boon said that the biggest enemy to the next Mortal Kombat game is NetherRealm resting on its laurels.
"I'm a big fan of fighting games, but some of them I've seen are just a re-skin of the same game with much prettier graphics and new characters," he said.
"Effectively it just delivers the same experience, and over the course of time these games sell less and less and less and less. I think you need to offer something that hasn't been done before. Like with Injustice, no one has done what we're doing with the game's backgrounds, and I think that's a big part of why it will appeal to fans."
