MK Special Forces Update

At the end of last summer, Mortal Kombat co-creator, John Tobias, and other key Midway employees decided to abandon their current action-adventure fighting-game project, Mortal Kombat Special Forces, in favor of starting their own company. Ever since the announcement of those departures, a big question mark appeared over the title. Midway insisted that Mortal Kombat Special Forces would continue, with or without its main storyteller. Tobias' strength was always in storytelling; after all, he created the intricacies that surround the Mortal Kombat storyline. Now that the master is gone, the storyline is in the hands of a new development crew.

Unsurprisingly, the game is undergoing a major overhaul. Since the main developers from both the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 teams have left, the remaining members have combined to focus on only the PlayStation version. Tobias' plan was to develop a storyline with many twists and turns that would keep the player on his toes. Apparently, the new development team was not able to deal with the complexities of the original storyline without the storyteller himself, so everything has been simplified.

In addition to storyline changes, the entire system of gameplay has also been changed. Characters previously had the abilities to jump, climb, and swim through the worlds; however, the game has been redesigned around these things to speed up the pace. Furthermore, the previous camera system has been scrapped and replaced with a basic system resembling Metal Gear Solid.

Previously, the cinematic cutscenes were going to be real-time scripted sequences, like in Zelda and Mario. The reason why the cutscenes were going to be real-time scripted sequences was the fact because the development teams wanted to keep more parity between the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation versions. Now that Mortal Kombat Special Forces is being developed for the PlayStation only, cinematic cutscenes have been changed from being real-time scripted sequences to full motion videos.

With all of these changes and improvements to Mortal Kombat Special Forces comes more development time. Mortal Kombat Special Forces has indefinitely been delayed from its last-known release date of spring 2000, with the next possibility for a release being this fall.