MK9 will get absolutely torn to shreds and obliterated by the modern and new FGC culture / NRS community. I don't see the game surviving for more than a month if NRS releases a remaster of MK9 without everyone demanding immediate and major patch changes to the game. Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and all other major outlets will have a field day trashing this game and picking apart it's flaws.
- People are going to cry non stop about 90% of the roster being unviable and not having what it takes to win major tournaments
- The game at the highest level boils down to about five viable characters, give or take a couple
- Counterpicking was way too easy to enforce
- Hitbox issues, bizarre glitches, and poorly implemented system bugs are in abundance
- Absolutely irritating play styles are present and in full force. I'm talking about the play styles that the majority do not get down with, ie. (Insane silly zoning, extremely braindead offense, characters that live in the air 24/7 and jump that cannot be touched by many characters in match ups, wake-ups that have almost zero counterplay, 1 Bar Hyper-Armor attacks that take 40% of your life that are readily available at almost all times, etc. etc.)
- Risk reward is completely screwed and makes no sense for some characters
- Random frame advantage on attacks like Cage's F+3
- Some moves are minus on hit for absolutely no reason
- Mass low profiling seeps through the game
- Lots of 2-8 and 1-9 match-ups
- Invincible wake-ups being available 24/7 which means some characters can never be properly oki'd
- Combo inconsistencies on some characters
- Lots of Mids that aren't actual mids and whiff on half of the cast
- Etc. etc. etc.
I can go on and on about the games issues but I'll leave it there. I'm not sure why Ed Boon is entertaining the idea of an MK9 remaster. While I would appreciate it because MK9 is my favorite NRS game, this is not going to "save" the community and bring everybody together as one happy group where everything all of a sudden becomes fine just because we all moved on from MK11. People think the outcry is bad now with MK11 balance, but I promise it will be worse when a lot of people feel they are forced to play a modernized version of MK9 that all of their friends are on, and now they have to deal with all of the BS that plagued the game. You want to play Jade? Sorry, that isn't possible in this game. You want to play your favorite character Liu Kang? Sorry he gets easily counterpicked in 2-8 match ups against characters like Kenshi that require no effort to do so in the match up. You're tired of losing to Kabal and want to counterpick him? Too bad. That doesn't exist. Etc.
I think the only way for NRS to save face from all of the harsh critique on this MK9 remaster is they would have to essentially "remake" the game from the ground up and change all of the balance, most of the game mechanics, fix the countless bugs, introduce GGPO, a fleshed out Ranked system, rebuild the entire training mode, etc. etc. Basically they would have to almost make a brand new game. And at that point, it will be so much different from the original MK9, why not just focus on making MK12 that "perfect" fighting game that so many players want?I'll definitely buy the MK9 remaster if it's true. But I'm for sure going to be bracing myself for the shit storm that is going to come if the game resembles anything close to the original MK9 product.
