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I am loving the Retrocade stage

Raidenwins

Raiden Practitioner
I know that's old news for everyone here, but yesterday was the first time I've played MK11 this year and the Retrocade stage was new for me, and was a very nice surprise. It doesn't make up for the abysmal story and lackluster music, but it's nice nonetheless. I like how it alternates between various classic stages with their own respective music. It instantly became my favorite stage.
 
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I hope they go back to that klassic creepy vibe for MK12. Also a non-hokey story. I imagine something more like NinjaScrolls or Basilisk where every character feels dangerous and you can take them seriously and the stakes feel real because no one is safe - lots of characters die. Maybe that’s just me tho
 

Metin

Ermac & Smoke Main
I hope they go back to that klassic creepy vibe for MK12. Also a non-hokey story. I imagine something more like NinjaScrolls or Basilisk where every character feels dangerous and you can take them seriously and the stakes feel real because no one is safe - lots of characters die. Maybe that’s just me tho
%100 agreed.
 

Art Lean

Noob
Hmm for me I’m not really a fan.

Whenever the background first fades into view as the match starts I get all excited when my eyes catch view of, say, the Courtyard’s blue skies, shaolin monks and Chinese architecture, then about a second later I remember it’s a pixelated 16bit wallpaper on a pretend projector and I’m fighting in a sticky floored arcade.

Basically it’s a massive cocktease.

I so wish it was the real Courtyard like in MK9 (or any of the other classic arenas it rotates with). The Island Ruins stage with its literal fifty shades of grey and its dull lifeless music just isn’t the same. :(
 
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Kiss the Missile

Red Messiah
Hmm for me I’m not really a fan.

Whenever the background first fades into view as the match starts I get all excited when my eyes catch view of, say, the Courtyard’s blue skies, shaolin monks and Chinese architecture, then about a second later I remember it’s a pixelated 16bit wallpaper on a pretend projector and I’m fighting in a sticky floored arcade.

Basically it’s a massive cocktease.

I so wish it was the real Courtyard like in MK9 (or any of the other classic arenas it rotates with). The Island Ruins stage with its literal fifty shades of grey and its dull lifeless music just isn’t the same. :(
As much as I adore Shang's Island Ruins, its a shame they never did anything further with the timebending stage gimmick that Kotal's Colliseum has. How some parts of it swap between Kotal and Shao's eras.
 

Art Lean

Noob
As much as I adore Shang's Island Ruins, its a shame they never did anything further with the timebending stage gimmick that Kotal's Colliseum has. How some parts of it swap between Kotal and Shao's eras.
Totally agree, wish we could just choose at the arena menu whether we get Shao or Kotal’s Coliseum like we could do on MKX with the past/present and infected arena versions. It could do with proper dynamic crowd cheers too as the fight progresses (MK2 had that did it not?).

I like Island Ruins but it’s too grey and the music is lifeless. The Fire Garden is my favourite most MK1 throwback arena in the game but even that lacks a glorious score like Shang Tsung’s Gardens had in MK9 to truly knock it out of the park.
 

Kiss the Missile

Red Messiah
Totally agree, wish we could just choose at the arena menu whether we get Shao or Kotal’s Coliseum like we could do on MKX with the past/present and infected arena versions. It could do with proper dynamic crowd cheers too as the fight progresses (MK2 had that did it not?).

I like Island Ruins but it’s too grey and the music is lifeless. The Fire Garden is my favourite most MK1 throwback arena in the game but even that lacks a glorious score like Shang Tsung’s Gardens had in MK9 to truly knock it out of the park.
I personally love static stages with little background movement.
Lot of people forget it was even a stage, but Rooftop Dawn was easily my favorite stage from MK9



That shit is just gorgeous to me. And Island Ruins brings back those vibes. I also love IR's song too. The Asian sound to it is perfect for MK and something about it just makes the fight feel dangerous. Idk
 

Art Lean

Noob
I personally love static stages with little background movement.
I do actually prefer the more peaceful backgrounds with less going on too, I just think that Kotal’s arena could do with proper crowd cheers during the fight, mercies and especially Brutalities to add to its atmosphere considering there is an actual huge animated crowd on display.
 

Raidenwins

Raiden Practitioner
Hmm for me I’m not really a fan.

Whenever the background first fades into view as the match starts I get all excited when my eyes catch view of, say, the Courtyard’s blue skies, shaolin monks and Chinese architecture, then about a second later I remember it’s a pixelated 16bit wallpaper on a pretend projector and I’m fighting in a sticky floored arcade.

Basically it’s a massive cocktease.

I so wish it was the real Courtyard like in MK9 (or any of the other classic arenas it rotates with). The Island Ruins stage with its literal fifty shades of grey and its dull lifeless music just isn’t the same. :(
I agree. I'd much rather have the real Courtyard from MK1 (my favorite stage of any game), and all the other classic stages, but Retrocade is the closest we have to them. It's ironic that a cocktease for classic stages is still better than 99% of all other stages in MK11. And that the music in Retrocade is better than 100% of the rest of the music in the game. I feel like MK11 did ok with the gameplay, the training modes, and online, but really dropped the ball with the story, music, and the character roster.

My wish list for MK12 includes complete wipe of the story from MK9 to MK11 and continuing in the original timeline right after Armageddon. All of these time travel, timelines, resetting history, and non stop bringing back of dead characters shenanigans made a big mess of the franchise's storyline. It seems like every franchise (MCU, Final Fantasy, etc) is doing this now and NRS decided to just follow suit.

For the music, they need to go back to the dark, creepy, fantasy martial artsy, old school Kung Fu movie themes, as opposed to the blockbuster action movie, melancholic, and whatever else you would call MK11's music.

Also, MK11 has more guest characters than any other MK game. 5 out of 37, which is roughly 14%. It's kind of pushing it to even call this an MK game at this point. It's more of a mashup of MK and various movie franchises owned by Warner Bros. They should just call it MK vs. Warner Bros so everybody knows what it is.

To sum it all up, my MK12 wish list is:

  1. Pretend MK9-MK11 story never happened. Start fresh in original timeline, after the events of MK Armageddon.
  2. No time travel.
  3. No alternate timelines.
  4. No alternate universes.
  5. No more bringing back of dead characters. That really cheapens the storyline and makes all the efforts of the protagonists to defeat an antagonist in a previous game pointless, i.e. if you are going to endlessly bring back Shao Khan and Shang Tsung what is the point of ever defeating them? If a character is too popular and fans always want them back, do not have them killed, and make it clear they are not dead.
  6. Bring back dark, creepy, fantasy martial artsy, old school Kung Fu campy movie themes, in the vein of MK1-MK Deception (and possibly Armageddon).
  7. No more guest characters.
  8. No more celebrity driven characters, i.e. characters should not look like any real life person. NRS is trying too hard to make MK as cinematic as possible. This is a game, not a movie. In a game, players want to immerse themselves in the experience, suspend their disbelief, and imagine themselves as the character doing all of these awesome things on the screen in front of them. Having characters that look like real life people, especially celebrities, breaks the illusion and turns the experience from one where "I am playing this game and as a [insert character name], i am doing all of these cool moves and i am fighting all of these bad guys" to one where "I am watching Rhonda Rousey or Sylvester Stallone (WTF??) in an MK game, doing all of these cool moves and fighting all of these bad guys." Unlike the passive arts such as books, painting, theater, movies, and TV shows, in videogames, which are interactive, the audience does not read or watch, the audience becomes the star of the show because it participates in and drives the action. I want to be the star of the show when i play a game, I don't want a celebrity to be the star of the show.
  9. Less violent fatalities. Seriously. MK11 crossed a line they should have never crossed. Many of the fatalities in MK11 are straight up disturbing murder scenes.
  10. As for the art style, i feel that a more stylized approach would work better than the ultra realism they are going for with MK11. By stylized, i mean something like Soul Calibur and Tekken, not quite the almost cartoony style in Street Fighter. This goes towards points #8 and #9 above also, i.e. if a stylized Sub-Zero rips the spine out of a defeated opponent, it doesn't look nearly as disturbing as if a photo realistic character looking like a real life person does it to another photo realistic character looking like a real life person.
 
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I completely agree with 6, 9 and 10. However guest characters and infinitely reviving characters I think are truly unavoidable for an iterative fg franchise like MK.
 
IMO brutalities hit the right note of “omg that’s fucked up lol”. The Fatalities since MKX just make me screw up my face in disgust. They’re not entertaining just disturbing and gross. Also I hear it does a number on the art team that has to use real world references to model the gore. Absolutely no need for that. Fatalities should be fun, not horrible.