I recently beat Mortal Kombat X’s single player mode. It was an awesome experience that let me try a ton of characters, and the story was honestly good, which is something you rarely say for fighting games. Then, after the credits rolled and everything was said and done I got a message which said “Unlocked Shinnok.”
Hurray?
I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t even expecting to unlock anything. It’s been ages since I had to unlock characters in a fighting game and when I was fooling around in training mode I didn’t even that Shinnok was missing. I just figured I was getting every character the game had to offer from the beginning, except for DLC characters, of course.
And there are a lot of DLC characters to choose from in Mortal Kombat X . Aside from Goro, who costs five dollars alone if you didn’t receive him for free as a pre-order bonus, there is a Kombat Pack with four different characters, including Jason Voorhees and The Predator. So that’s five characters that you just don’t get unless you spend money for them. Meanwhile, you only receive one character for doing things inside the game.
There are a lot of other things you can receive for playing the game, like costumes, fatalities, concept art, and the like, and that’s cool. However, I feel much less motivated to grind “koins” in order to get these than I would be to get a character or a new fighting variation.
I know that’s not necessarily the point. Koins are kind of a passive thing you get for doing things you would do with the game anyway, like versus matches or climbing up the challenge tower. However, this makes the Krypt, the place you spend koins, kind of an afterthought. I mostly ignore it until something actively reminds me it exists.
The worst part is, I’m playing the game less because of it. I already know I have the full roster when it comes out, so the single-player modes are just less appealing to me. However, if I had the ability to unlock characters like Rain, Baraka, and Sindel by playing through challenge towers, I would definitely look at them as more interesting modes than I currently do.
Meanwhile, there is this huge locked roster that we are all going to end up paying money for. That’s not particularly a bad thing, most of us are happy to spend that money. But at the same time, is this harming the replayability of the game? Frankly, I thought locked characters are kind of a cheap tactic to extend the life of a game anyway, but DLC rosters just feel hollow.
Maybe what this calls for is a combination of the two. Maybe we should make big locked rosters with interesting unlock conditions which are actually difficult to achieve. Then, we can either battle our way up the challenge towers on very hard, or if we want, simply pay a “dlc price” to unlock them in the market. In my opinion, that’s the best of both worlds.
What do you think? Are DLC characters replacing unlockables? Let us know in the comments