While I still enjoy the game and it is my favourite MK game easily. I definitely agree with many of its criticisms and I'm looking forward to its future.
Now, despite that I voted "met" in terms of my overall satisfaction with the game, I am absolutely disappointed with the variation system this time around. To be clear; I have no problem with the concept of variations. It's viable but somehow NRS likes to get in their own way. I have been in the camp in favor of customs since beta, which was still the most fun the game was imo largely due to said custom variations and a few other things.
I strongly disagree with those who say that we need to just cram all the moves together in one package or that variations make incomplete characters; this has been said before but the absence of variations would not, in absolutely any way whatsoever, mean that the resulting character would have any more moves than they currently do. I'll admit that definitely not all variations are well done, but simply taking them out of the equation is not the auto-fix you guys think it is, I promise you.
This has been said before but I think it's important and worth repeating; wasting man hours creating all these cool abilities that permeate everywhere throughout the game all except for a single mode/rule set was a monumental error. We can argue that the ranked/tournament scene is such a tiny % of the players, but the reality is a very large portion of players defers to that tiny % for consuming media and high level gameplay of MK11. The result is 99% of the game is disregarded because it doesn't fit in this one rule set, and that's a real fucking shame.
To make things worse, many of the custom moves are actual throwaways. Stephanie mentioned in one of the later Kombat Kasts that many of these moves were never intended for tournament use. If this is indeed true, my question to NRS is:
WHY?
Why spend all that time and money designing literally dead moves? Who are you making these moves for? What benefit is purposely half-assing these abilities bringing to the game that couldn't have been achieved, and better, by just designing them to the same standard as the tournament moves?
If this decision was made for people who just wanna flail around and have dumb fun with the game, then you genuinely fucked up here, NRS. That group of people doesn't care any more about the tournament moves than the custom moves, so why not design all the moves for tournament play since it really makes no difference to the "goof around" group either way? Why create a pool of moves just to effectively erase a significant portion of them from an also significant amount of players?
Wouldn't designing the entire game to the same standard be better for the overall game? I don't mean to suggest to make the game too opaque for new players to enjoy, but simply that these players will get the same enjoyment out of any fighter they play regardless to whether it caters to them.
It's absurd to me that this amount of waste was the intention all along. It really isn't the mountain impossible task to just make a bunch of good moves that have synergy with each other in fun ways without being literal garbage with no real purposes.
Then they do shit like Terminate...
The fumble on the variations is so bad that we still have a game full of characters who are shipped default with two UNFINISHED variations that aren't even their ranked versions. The amount of confusion I've seen from people asking how to "unlock" the ranked variations is astounding because of how obtuse the loadouts are at a glance. Please someone explain to me the logic behind giving players sample variations that have empty slots. Why can I participate in Spawn's premiere tower but am forced to use his Variation 1 without the dive cape? It would have been less effort to just slap on his actual V1 instead of just randomly removing one of its moves for the activity. What the actual fuck is that, NRS?
The game is still very fun and I enjoy it quite a lot. Needs improvements, etc, but damn there's some massive drops that were super preventable.
Also, thank you
@M2Dave for bringing up the details about the throws. It's quite frustrating reading so much whining about throw techs and getting your poke beaten as though MK11 invented it, then praise MKX in the same breath.
This post became much longer than I thought it was going to be.
