Found on Reddit:
Summary of what happened if you are confused:
- Terminator has an outro that displays a "fake Kombat Pack 2" with characters like Mileena, Rain, and a few others listed.
- A fan got mad about it and tweeted at Daanish Syed (who is an NRS employee)
- Fan asks how they are supposed to react to the outro when it makes fun of community requested characters
- Syed says by laughing
- Fan is basically like whatever, but why didn't Rain take Kollector's place in the story?
- Syed says it's because they didn't want him to.
- Syed goes on to say that NRS wants to give fans what they want, but they have to be passionate about it. If they aren't, then they can't do that thing justice, therefore it won't come out right and thus shouldn't be added to the game. While he isn't directly talking about Mileena, the context was on community requested content -- mainly characters -- and Mileena is obviously apart of that.
For the record, I don't agree with that fan coming at NRS employees like that. Also, at the end of the day it's NRS' game and they should do what they want with it. But I don't really think Syed's responce was a good one because he basically said 1) they aren't passionate about the characters the community wants which is crazy considering it's THEIR (NRS') characters and said characters have helped define the series, and 2) they will not add characters the community wants unless they want them too... Which is basically a weird way of saying NRS will do what they want and it doesn't matter if the community wants it or not, lol.
To be fair Daanish, doesn't doesn't represent the entirety of NRS and he doesn't even decide on skins, characters, etc, as far as I know. He's mainly just a UI guy. But still, he works there and this is the closest thing we have to seeing NRS' mindset when it comes community requested characters. I'm sure there are other factors too, though. Wouldn't be surprised if they removed Mileena that way they can bring her back next game to drum up more hype (but they will probably remove Jade or Kitana, lol). Similar to what they did with Jade and Noob Saibot: They were in MK9, removed in MKX, brought back in MK11 for hype.
After reading this, I think people are overreacting. NetherRealm Studios
does listen to its fan base and has with every
Mortal Kombat game post-
Mortal Kombat (2011).
Typically as DLC, requested characters, both in-universe and guest,
do get added, but it usually happens the next game/Kombat Pack.
With
Mortal Kombat (2011), people were heavily requesting Tanya, Predator, Alien, Jason, Michael Myers, Tremor, etc. Look at the Kombat Pack for
Mortal Kombat X.
During that game, people continued to request Alien and other horror guests like crazy, as well as Terminator, as well as heavily asking for Cyrax and Sektor and 3D era characters like Fujin, Bo, Frost, etc. Look at the Kombat Pack for
Mortal Kombat XL.
The Kombat Pack for
Mortal Kombat 11 is full of heavily requested characters that were being asked for heavily post-
Mortal Kombat XL. Skarlett was added to the base Roster, as was Frost.
And the franchise
is NetherRealm's, not ours. They decide on the roster, what klassic characters they want to work with and what new characters they want to include or create. If they don't feel a certain character for the game, it makes sense that they won't do them since they don't want to do them an injustice (pun not intended).
I say this as a Mileena main. I don't get any negativity from that tweet exchange, to be honest.