Ed Boon talks about what’s coming up in year 2 of Mortal Kombat 1

NetherRealm Studios rebooted its 32-year-old Mortal Kombat universe with last year’s Mortal Kombat 1, resetting the balance of power and giving classic characters new origin stories. This week, NetherRealm will continue the story of MK1 with the Khaos Reigns expansion, which introduces new (reimagined) characters and new conflicts.

Mortal Kombat 1’s story ended in total chaos, much to the delight of Havik, the masochistic leader from Chaosrealm who seeks to upset Liu Kang’s new order. Khaos Reigns will welcome newcomers Cyrax and Sektor — newly reimagined as armored female warriors — and Noob Saibot — now a twisted creation of Havik — to the roster, and push the Mortal Kombat story forward into uncharted territory.

Ahead of the expansion’s release we spoke to Mortal Kombat series co-creator Ed Boon about what fans can expect in year two of MK1, how NetherRealm chooses new additions to the game’s roster, and what he thinks of Karl Urban as Johnny Cage.

The following interview has been condensed and edited.

Polygon: What was your approach to following up Mortal Kombat 1 with Khaos Reigns? What did you want to accomplish?

Ed Boon: It’s something that we started doing with Aftermath in Mortal Kombat 11 — it was the first time that we continued the story, and I think it worked out really nicely for MK11. This gives us an opportunity to continue this new Liu Kang reimagining of the universe, plus bring back more characters [and] more guest characters. 

Everybody wants new characters. It’s funny, you know, with 20-something characters already, [everyone wants] more, more, more. As if anybody plays all 25 equally. [laughs] So we brought back characters, but we also wanted to mix things up. There’s always that kind of balance that we’re trying to achieve: We don’t want to repeat ourselves too much, but there’s this very strong nostalgia itch. Everybody’s like, “I want to see my favorite character come back!” And with 100-something characters that we’ve had over the years, it’s inevitable that we’re going to leave some out that people are clamoring for. 

Noob [Saibot] was certainly one of them. The cyber ninjas were another. We still have people clamoring for Jade and Sonya as a main character and all that stuff. But nonetheless, we’re excited about this new package. There’s, you know, new Animalities, game features, all that.

I wanted to talk about the character selection process, that balance of trying to hit the nostalgia but also hit the broader appeal of the guest characters. You’ve got the three returning characters — Cyrax, Sektor, and Noob Saibot — and you’ve got the three guest characters. What’s that filtration process like? Do you just bust into the meeting room at some point and say, “It’s Noob time!”?

I am absolutely an advocate of getting as many opinions from the rest of the team as possible. I always send out this obligatory email with, like, “Here’s all the high-profile [Mortal Kombat] characters we haven’t done yet. What do you guys think?” And everybody chimes in. I just kind of assemble all of that and put my take as well. My take is usually most inspired by the feedback that I read from players. If there’s this relentless clamoring for a character, that’s going to weigh pretty heavily. But it’s absolutely this big casting call that I send out, and then I spend a whole lot of time just whittling it down, hearing the reasons, and then it usually boils down to about what we release, with maybe one or two sneaking in and out. 

Same thing with the guest characters too. The first thing is [asking] what everybody wants. Some are eliminated, just because we just can’t make it happen — it’s not just our choice, it’s the IP holder. There are a lot of hoops.

We try to find that balance between newness and novelty.

Speaking of Noob Saibot, is his head-splitting Fatal Blow a reference to Hot Shots: Part Deux?

No. [laughs] Maybe subconsciously. That wasn’t me, though. That move came from the team, and it used to completely separate the head and the jaw. And even I, at some point, was like, “You know, if they separate the head and the jaw, they couldn’t get up and fight.” We’ve pushed that line quite a bit over the years, but at some point — even we have to have some rules. Our head of cinematics, he has this saying: “We’re NetherRealm. We’re not rocket scientists.”

Why bring back Animalities now?

​​We brought them back because of the feedback that we got when we brought back Friendship moves, and even Babalities way back in MK9. Again, I think it’s scratching this nostalgia itch that a lot of Mortal Kombat fans have.

Once we did the Friendship moves [in MK11] and we got such a really positive response, in my head, I was like, Next is Animalities. And you know, we can represent them with so much more fidelity and they’re so much more interesting than they were in MK3. We had, like, we had this [tiny amount of] memory left [for them] that we had to make them, like, 4-bit images. They were basically monochromatic, and the animations were like, you know, two frames. But you know Animalities were rumors from MK2 that we made true for MK3. And I kind of feel like we’re finally seeing the realization of what they could be with Khaos Reigns. 

What’s your favorite combination of fighter and animal for the new Animalities?

Oh, man, there’s a lot that everybody hasn’t seen yet. Let me think. Probably, and this is a little bit of a cop out, but Scorpion turning into a scorpion is probably my favorite one.

What about new Kameo Fighters? You haven’t announced new ones, but is that something you’re looking to expand in year two of MK1 as well?

Yes. To my fault, I guess I never really communicated it clearly outside of the team, but yes. To me, it would feel a little bit weird to suddenly just stop doing them, with as many as we have in the game now. I think that the mix-and-matches are interesting. I really love seeing players [coming up with] crazy combos with this Kameo and this main fighter. I think that just keeps things really interesting.

MK1 has been a big foray into live-service, seasonal content with Invasions mode. What have you learned running a live-service game now, and what are you looking to improve on for Invasions? Obviously, people are always looking for more rewards from Invasions, more reasons to play.

From my perspective, the term live service, there is an implication that Here’s more content that you gotta pay to experience, whether it’s a battle pass or a new expansion or something. And we never envisioned Invasions as, Here’s season two, pay us to play it, to play season three, and whatnot. So I never really looked at Invasions as a games-as-a-service kind of feature. I always thought of it as just a re-engagement. Every season, there’s more stuff to go through, but that does come with the expectation of Where are my skins? Where’s my game currency? 

For me it’s more of an engagement thing. Why should I come back? You know, single-player-wise? Everybody kind of consumes the story mode, and then it’s like, OK, what reason do I have for coming back? 

But since you’ve got year two coming up, are there any changes to Invasions? What’s your approach there based on feedback?

Yeah, oh, 100%. This next season that’s coming, there’s way more variety of modes to play. There’s more Test Yours, just a wider variety of experiences, some of which we’re going to be announcing pretty soon. But there are other ones we want people to just kind of discover. But at the end of the day, the goal was: Let’s have a wider variety of things to do.

And again, we’re going to continue doing more updates, more skins, more Kameos, more characters and stuff like that.

I know you probably hear about this all the time on Twitter, but one of the quality-of-life updates people will not shut up about is character skin and color selection at the character select screen. Is this something you’re actively working on?

Well, it’s certainly a possibility in the future. We always have a running list of what we hear players wanting. That list is very long, and that’s certainly [on the list]. And so we are going to be dropping new features like that as we continue to support the game.

Finally, I know you saw a rough cut of Mortal Kombat 2 (the movie). How’s Karl Urban as Johnny Cage? Do you have any notes?

I like him. He’s very funny. You know, it’s interesting — oh, god no, I shouldn’t say it. You’ll see. He’s very funny in it. He’s definitely different from our Johnny Cage, like the one in MK1. He’s a little more down and out. He’s definitely got a lot of funny lines.

Karl’s 52 years old, by the way. He didn’t have to do any splits for the movie, did he?

How can you not think of Johnny Cage doing the splits? 

That’s the kind of perfect Ed Boon non-answer that I love to hear. 

Yeah. [laughs] I feel like a politician sometimes.