Everyone? Huh? From actual competitive players who know what they’re talking about, I’ve seen nothing but praise. Game looks amazing. Only complaint I’ve seen that makes any sense is dashes being too weak with too much startup/recovery.
It's not really aimed anywhere, but I'm going to go somewhere.
Pro players, and the competitive scene have their roles and are important in a lot of ways, but there is a limit to what they can say that has any relevance to a game as it is experienced by the "other people." The scrubs, the casuals, the whatever negative, dismissive label that gets toss around the direction of the bulk of humanity that is actually buying a game.
MKX got a lot of negative flak over its competitive qualifications, and IJ2 tried real hard to give the people that didn't like MKX something more respectable to compete in. There are a lot of people that took a pass waiting for MK to take its turn as something more accessible/enjoyable to the player base as a whole. It may and totally could turn out great, but it's pretty evident that they are shooting for something very different from what was really working for a lot of fans.
The MK franchise has always had a unique, far reaching appeal that brought in large groups of people that normally don't even care about FG's. It's easy to be dismissive about casual play and who gets to have an opinion, but in all seriousness, how many people in a game even matter competitively? I'm betting a lot of people would struggle to name more than 30-40 people genuinely relevant to a game. There may be some really quality players outside of the top 100 in a game, but I doubt more than 25-30 have any real shot of making top-8 at a stacked event.
The competitive nature of a game is a short lived fireworks display for a game featuring tens of people. Literally millions of people will try to play this game. Most of which, regardless of the amount of effort they put in, will never be any good at it. These people have all kinds of reasons they aren't going to be good, but they still are going to want to have an enjoyable time. A lot of "real fighters" aren't particularly good at providing anything to a less than hardcore audience, but MK has historically done a pretty good job at serving that crowd better than other fighters. If they have been starving through IJ2, and find out MK11 requires too much of them to enjoy, then we will probably hear a little something about that. Can you have fun and fundamentals? Hopefully. If not, which is more important, not to a single high level player's personal taste, but to MK specifically?
I personally think it could play out to be a solid game everyone can enjoy, and hope it can serve both crowds well. I also think it has more viewership appeal than IJ2, even though it is a little slow - which everyone did notice.
