UPDATE
Were you someone who saw a “Quitality” during the stress test? Let us know in the comments below!
ORIGINAL STORY
Let’s be blunt here for a moment. When it comes to competitions, no matter where they happen in the world or at what level of skill, people don’t like to love. Some people indeed take losing with grace and endeavor to simply “get better” over time if they do lose, but more times than not, people will go to great lengths not to lose. When you’re doing an online competition in the gaming space, one of the biggest “faux pas” that happens quite often is quitting an online match mid-fight. Well, if you do that in Mortal Kombat 1, you’ll get embarrassed.
The reveal comes from Ed Boon himself, who, over the weekend, made a post showing off what happens if a player leaves an online match early:
As you can see, Mortal Kombat 1 won’t spare the quitter the shame of a painful death. Instead, they’ll still die on screen, and the other player will get to laugh at them as their “escape plan” didn’t go the way they wanted.
Will this stop all the quitters from doing this mid-match? Not likely. After all, some people just don’t want to witness the death and/or not see themselves get dominated by another player. So they’ll leave the fight simply because they don’t have the will to stick around.
But unlike in other games, this “Quitality” screen will give the other player some satisfaction outside of the knowledge that they won by disconnecting. Typically, when online games have a character bailout, they merely get a “the player has left the match” screen, and that can really rub players the wrong way, especially if they’re invested in the match.
So if nothing else, this is a matter of “closure,” and it’s cool that NetherRealm Studios was up for doing something like this.
The weekend was a big one for the game as a “stress test” was happening for the title. It’s unclear what changes need to be made based on it, but NetherRealm knows how to make good online fights, so we should trust them to make everything smooth.
The real joy that players will get, however, is that we’ll hopefully start getting more roster announcements soon. We only know certain characters who will be playable, and the “Kameos” are different characters who aren’t playable, so the roster could be stacked in numerous ways.
Plus, we could have another “Quitality” style surprise on the way! Only time will tell.