Wasn't a fan of them myself, I'd rather just have a complete character that makes you feel "this is Retile, this is how he plays" with a strong, varied and unique moveset, like in MKs 1-4.
Having 3 different modes for each character felt like it robbed many characters of their full identity, whilst also feeling overwhelming for those like me who just play casually. I just want to play as Kitana, I don't want to have to study whether variation 1 is useless if I'm up against a variation 3 Sub Zero, and have at least 3 different versions of Kitana to have to learn before I can ever hope to just win some clothes off KL.
For me, character selection should be as simple as selecting Kabal because I think he looks cool, he controls fluidly, I like whacking people with hook swords and he has an awesome fatality.
I at least preferred it when custom variations came in, I could now make characters how I wanted them to be for when I play KL, using the moves I personally liked and found the most comfortable to pull off, but I'd still rather have complete characters so I can have access to all of the moves designed for a character. Maybe I'm naive (I probably am) but for me I feel that if they've done their job right in development, then all the characters should just be designed to balance well off one another regardless, rather that saying "you can do this move, but not if you have that move... and that move there? Well don't even think about using that online, because we won't even let you!". Well how about you take out the problematic move then and actually rework the character? The very notion of there being "illegal" moves that you can't use against other players seems ridiculous; if you feel it's not a fair move, why did you put it in the game?
And again, as a casual player, I also HATED how in MKX they had to change the costumes of the characters depending on what variation you used. So if I want to play as Cassie in her Scorpion costume, but want the brawler variation, I have to have her (I'm exaggerating here because I can't be bothered to check what each variation specifically looked like) with no mask, clown shoes and a luminous green cowboy hat. Or if I want her to have her mask on looking like a real Shira Ryu ninja, well then I have to use the tap dance variation. I honestly ended up selecting the variations that made my character look the best and just sticking with those.
That said, if Ed's words are completely true, then the phrase "when we do another game..." suggests there's certainly no progress on MK12 being in development at the moment.
