The speculation on the changes to the combo system leads me to believe that strings remain, but that NRS' "auto-guard" property might be altered or removed.
For instance, Reptile's d4 is something crazy like +24 in MKX. But despite that advantage, run-in into any other string doesn't combo because it initiates "auto-guard." This property is peculiar to NRS games, and leads to a lot of oddities and exceptions (like how 34xxdd3 is a combo starter for Reptile in Noxious, because its dd3 "turns off" this property).
MK11 may reduce overall frame advantage, but remove this quirk. That way, any advantage listed is always "real," and unambiguously shows what combos and what doesn't. This would also have the effect of reducing the double-digit plus-frames enabling guessing games that are so hard to contest.
This would mean that, if it worked like this, you can "time" strings back-to-back, which is closer to SF than MK's norm, but retains the strings themselves. Counter-hits may even emerge in this game to facilitate such a mechanic (though I doubt it).
Excited to see what happens tomorrow.
