Competitive custom variations for Mortal Kombat 11 was wanted by Ed Boon half a year ago but he wasn't making any promises back then
It was recently announced that custom variations will now be legal at tournaments and Kombat League upon the release of Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate on November 17, 2020. Mileena, Rain and Rambo will also be releasing on that date via the Kombat Pass 2.
What's worth noting is that custom variations have always been in Mortal Kombat 11. Despite being one of the main selling points of the latest Mortal Kombat entry, the custom variation system is, up to this point, not legal at tournaments or Kombat League.
Upon the game's launch, each fighter was armed with only two competitive variations. After a period of time, NetherRealm Studios eventually patched in a third set for everyone.
Even with three forms for each character, there were still plenty of moves that went unused in the competitive versions. Before the release of Mortal Kombat 11, Ed Boon noted why this was decided.
"[Competitors] want regulation. They want, 'these are your tools to work with, and there's no changing them,'" said Ed Boon in an interview with Game Informer. "So we knew this was more of a feature that the mass market would certainly love. But the competitive guys, they want a regulation pool table, a regulation basketball court."
What's funny is that there's become a bit of a demand from top players to make custom variations legal at events. EG|SonicFox was one of the players that was pushing for this on social media.
Either due to this fan demand or some other factor, Ed Boon apparently changed his tune about half a year ago. All of a sudden, he too was interested in bringing custom variations to competitive Mortal Kombat 11, but he wasn't making any promises at the time. Notably, this was before the announcement of the Aftermath Edition update.
"I can't promise anything, but what I would love to see in the future of Mortal Kombat 11 is allowing players to use created variations in tournament gameplay and stuff like that," stated Boon. "That's something that so far we've kind of built a wall between the competitive stuff."
"It's like okay, you got to use the variations that we made, and we've launched with two, and then we followed up with the third one for every character," continued Boon. "We're happy with how that is right now, but to me, the dream situation would be for us to allow players to create their own and mix things up. So that to me would be the next step if we're able to pull it off. I certainly can't promise anything, but it's something I would love for us to be able to do."
There will surely be some balance adjustments to moves that are currently missing from each fighter's base variations. It's already been mentioned that the Terminator's "Terminate" option will be unavailable.
As mentioned by NetherRealm Studios Senior QA Analyst, Stephanie "16-bit" Brownback, this is very likely going to be "the biggest potential meta shift in Mortal Kombat."
Image source: Game Informer.
