Mortal Kombat 1's graphics on Nintendo's hybrid console have been widely panned, with many wondering how the developer …
Fans have taken to the likes of X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok to question NetherRealm’s decision to market Mortal Kombat 1 as a $70 Switch release. It has been called “robbery” and “disrespectful” to users.
Well that makes sense. The switch is a less powerful platform, an intentional trade off for the mobility. And at this point, it’s on the older side. Either accept the trade off so you can play on an airplane or buy a more powerful modern device like a steam deck.
If you’re buying this (or anything other than Nintendo exclusive games) for your switch, it’s because you don’t have any other options and likely only own a switch
If you had a PC or a PS5, you’d buy it on that.
So switch only owners would pay whatever for it, but the rest of us wouldnt
I own a ton of games on my switch that aren’t switch exclusives. I travel a lot and use it like a Gameboy on planes, in hotels etc. Anyone using a switch entirely as a home console experience, ya silly to not buy games on PC etc instead.
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
Not always true; some games work really well on handheld/portable devices and the Switch is really good for that. The Binding of Isaac springs to mind.
Inb4 the “omg this is so entitled I swear I mean you guys are sending us DEATH THREATS I have PROOF that DEATH THREATS were sent to the developers (by our firm’s sockpuppet accounts) and that is so uncool stop being so ENTITLED” PR statement
While the OP meant it the way he answered you, the way I see it used most often colloquially is that when someone or something does the heavy lifting especially in gaming, they are providing the bulk of the work. Like doing the heavy lifting in a team game equates to carrying the team, or saying a character does the heavy lifting instead of the player, means the character is overpowered and carrying the player (or vice versa).
Seriously, it’s a product for sale. Don’t like the price, vote with your wallet and don’t buy it. What’s with the manufactured outrage for every topic nowadays
Others have already replied with this info but I’m just spelling it out for anyone who is not familiar like me:
They fucking named the brand new game mk1. Is it a remaster? No. It’s not a remaster. Is it a recreation of mk1? No. It’s an alternate timeline game given the worst name in the history of naming things. It’s genuinely a brand new game.
Sometimes I wish I could have a job where companies just say “hey should we make this decision” and I tell them “that’s so fucking stupid no one will actually like that” and get paid well for it.
I’ve had some similar roles before, but more often than not companies just do it anyway, even if you have a lot of data to the contrary. It’s stupidly easy for someone in management to push some of this through despite the data, choose an arbitrary metric to define their success, get their bonus, and then bail for another company. Meanwhile, folks left at the company have to then try and fix all of the nonsense. It blows that we value failing forward. I’ve seen a few decent products just tanked this way.
Its not an old game, MK1 is the latest release. The people getting served this are running it on hardware that was weak last generation. At a certain point you simply cannot push these devices any further. MK1 for Switch was never going to look beautiful, the current gen Switch can’t do it. I’m okay with devs making their games available, I mean at least you can play it. Theres a reason a Switch 2 is in the works.
Which is bullshit. It reminds me of when web email services offered ridiculously small inbox sizes, such as 25MB or 50MB. Then in came Google and offered 1GB, and all of a sudden all those companies found the way to match Google’s offering.
But I guess if people are willing to pay for those ridiculous prices, and deal with in-game payments… shrug.
Because you have the full choice to not buy and support it, if you think the price is unreasonable. It’s not a vital need, and nobody’s forcing customers to buy it. Housing, food, healthcare, we don’t have a choice. Buy or die. A video game? Not so much. The issue is not game publishers overcharging, it’s players who moan and whine… AND THEN BUY IT ANYWAY, thus ensuring the publishers will continue the practice
People are complaining because they don’t like a thing, that’s fine. Same as you’re complaining in this post. Call companies out on their bullshit. Also don’t buy bullshit, that’s a good point too.
Because it doesn’t qualify as bullshit. Company made a product, set a price. Either you find it worth the price or not, but either way what’s the reason to kick up a fuss over an optional good
Company also sold pre-orders for a product, which means people can’t really decide whether the product is exactly what they want until they get it. At which point they complain, because they trusted the company not to sell a sub-par product. What is your issue?
My guy, the complaint is about the price because of the quality. Or, as you are asking, are you saying people didn’t know the price when they bought it?
On a side note, preorders are a scam. If you’re dumb enough to preorder a game in unlimited supply, that’s on you.
I agree that pre-orders are a scam, but it’s shitty to say “you knew what you bought!” when some people literally couldn’t.
I’m not saying they knew what they bought, I’m saying it’s on them for choosing to buy before they knew what they were buying. Seriously, people need to take responsibility for their choices already.
Company made a product, set a price. Either you find it worth the price or not, but either way what’s the reason to kick up a fuss over an optional good
Now you’re saying it’s on people who pre-order. Can’t we stop pushing this on the consumer and start demanding better from the manufacturers? Why can they sell shitty products, instead of being held to higher standards?
It probably cost more in development to port the game to Switch than any other console. Graphics quality is irrelevant when users willingly buy a device with worse hardware than consoles. This seems like a case of “fans” wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
To all people who buy switch and say it’s not about the graphics, it’s about the experience, this is what you get.
I’m not criticizing them saying this , I’m just making a point that switch as inferior hardware and you can’t expect to have the game with the same graphics as ps5.
The game price is not tied to the graphics, it’s tired to the amount of work they had to put in it, which I’m sure is a lot
Yeah I looked and idk what to say - it looks like a switch game.
If you bought a switch, which was an extremely underpowered when it was released 6 years ago, and then get upset when AAA games releasing on current gen consoles look like dogshit… You have nobody to blame but yourself.
Isn’t a PS5 vs Switch comparison kind of like a PS4 vs Wii comparison? They’re not even the same hardware generation, it’s a wonder they’re even dedicating resources to this.
Realistically it’s entirely possible it took more platform specific work to make the switch version viable than anything else.
It’s possible, but that’s wild speculation, and I think pretty unlikely.
It’s not their fault it’s lesser hardware.
It’s their fault for releasing a 70$ game on “lesser hardware” while not spending the time to get it working and looking well-enough. They didn’t have to release it.
It’s not wild speculation. The CPU is 20 tiers worse than dogshit and getting anything that’s even a hint of demanding to even function at all on it is a lot of work.
What’s your point? It’s absolutely possible to make fun games that are simple and not demanding.
It’s also extremely limiting. The vast majority of recent games can’t possibly be made to run on anything anywhere close to as underpowered as the Switch.
I am just annoyed when people say the switch hardware is shit. It’s not shit, it’s just a completely different approach, that’s all. Also it’s annoying you’re using one of the shittiest ports ever to push this idea. They could have built this game from the ground up for switch and had something that looked and ran good. But that wasn’t their plan. The plan was a half assed port.
But it actually is obscenely underpowered, even for mobile, and the CPU is a massive limitation that keeps the vast majority of last gen games from being possible.
It changed the space by showing low end open world games on handheld were possible, but it hit its ceiling extremely quickly. There’s a reason most AAA games didn’t support it, and it’s because it isn’t capable.
I have a PC, PS5, and Switch, and never felt like the Switch was underpowered. Samewise, my phone doesn’t feel underpowered compared to my laptop, because I recognise they’re completely different devices.
You don’t get a Switch to play the latest God of War, you get it to play Mario and Zelda games, and cute lo-fi indie games
Yeah I am a switch owner and also play on my Mac and on Windows with virtual machines, and the majority of switch ports are just garbage and should not have been released. I paid for the outer worlds on switch and it was awful, just a loading screen simulator.
Yes in a world that expects hardware to always get better and software to always be written sloppily and/or assuming those constant improvements I guess it makes sense to be angry at one of the greatest game consoles ever created
Remember when games used a few KB of memory and they did smart things to make that work? No you probably don’t because you’d be angered by that hardware’s existence
the point isn’t that it should cost less, it’s that it shouldn’t have been released to begin with AND it costs more than most games. the price isn’t really the problem, it just compounds on it to make it all seem worse.
No, it is wild speculation. Turning off graphical effects etc. until you get acceptable frame rates isn’t hard and doesn’t take long, definitely not as long as implementing them for the other consoles.
You don’t need to rebuild the game because the CPU is slower.
Graphical effects have never been the problem. They’re completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.
CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.
Graphical effects have never been the problem. They’re completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.
What? This whole topic is about the lower quality of MK1 on the switch. How is the CPU involved in the graphics of MK1? You’ll need to share a source that this is the problem.
CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.
Please share a source, or at least a detailed description of what exactly the CPU is too slow for to run MK1 with higher quality. It sure as hell isn’t involved in shader execution, which is where most of the graphical fidelity comes from (if you’re developing a game post 2000).
The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can’t do math. There’s no way to mitigate that.
It’s also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.
The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can’t do math. There’s no way to mitigate that.
Yes, which is why the CPU isn’t the problem. It’s the GPU.
It’s also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.
Please share a source for this. A game like MK1 doesn’t need a lot of CPU power, because there just isn’t anything complicated happening. It’s all GPU that’s missing.
Am not an expert but i think particles and physics are both calculated by the CPU. Both very intensive tasks. Graphic wise, from looking at the screenshot above, it seems they only lowered the quality of model and it looks awful because they went for realism. The not so easy fixable problem is the characters design, Switch games look cartoonish for a reason.
Physics are calculated by the CPU, but a game like MK1 doesn’t have many physics to calculate - almost everything is pre-made animations. Particles are updated by the CPU, but rendered by the GPU.
And yeah, that’s why my point was that it’s not the CPU that is limiting the graphics.
It doesn’t look like a hardware issue. Yes, the less powerful hardware is what forced graphical changes, but it looks like an art direction problem.
The changes mostly fail to capture the essence of the original design. The characters look like they were ripped from the SIMs.
No one is expecting the same lighting, textures, or poly counts, but they do expect something that looks like Mortal Combat. That isn’t an unreasonable expectation.
You’re right that this may be a budgeting issue of sorts, but if they can’t set aside enough resources to make it look like some sort of Mortal Combat game, then maybe they shouldn’t have made the port.
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Do people not realize that some, if not all store fronts have a clause that the base price of a game has to be the same on other storefronts.
I know its true for steam vs other pc store fronts, but i believe its probably true for consoles as well.
Well that makes sense. The switch is a less powerful platform, an intentional trade off for the mobility. And at this point, it’s on the older side. Either accept the trade off so you can play on an airplane or buy a more powerful modern device like a steam deck.
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What a horrendous website.
I’ve seen phone games look better
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If you’re buying this (or anything other than Nintendo exclusive games) for your switch, it’s because you don’t have any other options and likely only own a switch
If you had a PC or a PS5, you’d buy it on that.
So switch only owners would pay whatever for it, but the rest of us wouldnt
I own a ton of games on my switch that aren’t switch exclusives. I travel a lot and use it like a Gameboy on planes, in hotels etc. Anyone using a switch entirely as a home console experience, ya silly to not buy games on PC etc instead.
I mean, not necessarily - they might be buying it on the switch because they want a “mobile” version and don’t own a steam deck.
But yeah, ultimately if you own a switch, you should know what to expect by now from anything that isn’t a first party Nintendo title (and even then it can be a bit hit or miss from a performance standpoint)
Sounds like they should accept their inferior switch version, or invest in better hardware.
Given that the switch version looks terrible even by Switch standard, I think they’re right to complain and refuse to buy it. And not everyone can just “invest in better hardware” the second an upgrade comes along. Let’s not forget that up until the Steam Deck, the switch was the gold standard for handheld gaming - mainly by virtue of being the only real option
I admit I haven’t really touched my switch much since I got a Steam Deck.
Not always true; some games work really well on handheld/portable devices and the Switch is really good for that. The Binding of Isaac springs to mind.
Inb4 the “omg this is so entitled I swear I mean you guys are sending us DEATH THREATS I have PROOF that DEATH THREATS were sent to the developers (by our firm’s sockpuppet accounts) and that is so uncool stop being so ENTITLED” PR statement
Ah, the Disney defence. “Everyone who dislikes our movie is a racist/misogynist.”
For the quality offered the cost was very steep, but its also true the Switch doing some major heavy lifting already.
What does that mean, the Switch doing some major heavy lifting?
While the OP meant it the way he answered you, the way I see it used most often colloquially is that when someone or something does the heavy lifting especially in gaming, they are providing the bulk of the work. Like doing the heavy lifting in a team game equates to carrying the team, or saying a character does the heavy lifting instead of the player, means the character is overpowered and carrying the player (or vice versa).
The hardware the game is running is painfully terrible in 2023.
Seriously, it’s a product for sale. Don’t like the price, vote with your wallet and don’t buy it. What’s with the manufactured outrage for every topic nowadays
I don’t think it’s “outrage”. It’s people making fun of the port on x and the website capitalizing on that to publish a story
They’re calling it robbery and disrespectful. I’m not seeing where the joke is
I think it’s clear that they’re not literally calling it a robbery, they’re just expressing their discontent in a twitter way.
I don’t like how many posts cater to outrage lately, true.
But I don’t think this one is manufactured.
Yeah, manufactured might have been the wrong word. Pointless? Uncalled for?
But why would it be pointless or uncalled for? $70 for a rather old game?
Edit: I’ve been schooled. Is a brand new game with a confusing name. Still $70 for a console game; yikes.
Others have already replied with this info but I’m just spelling it out for anyone who is not familiar like me:
They fucking named the brand new game mk1. Is it a remaster? No. It’s not a remaster. Is it a recreation of mk1? No. It’s an alternate timeline game given the worst name in the history of naming things. It’s genuinely a brand new game.
Holy shit. They really fucked up with that name.
Sometimes I wish I could have a job where companies just say “hey should we make this decision” and I tell them “that’s so fucking stupid no one will actually like that” and get paid well for it.
That’s my dream.
I’ve had some similar roles before, but more often than not companies just do it anyway, even if you have a lot of data to the contrary. It’s stupidly easy for someone in management to push some of this through despite the data, choose an arbitrary metric to define their success, get their bonus, and then bail for another company. Meanwhile, folks left at the company have to then try and fix all of the nonsense. It blows that we value failing forward. I’ve seen a few decent products just tanked this way.
I mean… we live in the timeline where we had the Xbox One being the third Xbox, and Battlefield 1 not being the first Battlefield.
I would not be surprised if we start seeing “[Game Title] One” for rebooted games.
Its not an old game, MK1 is the latest release. The people getting served this are running it on hardware that was weak last generation. At a certain point you simply cannot push these devices any further. MK1 for Switch was never going to look beautiful, the current gen Switch can’t do it. I’m okay with devs making their games available, I mean at least you can play it. Theres a reason a Switch 2 is in the works.
That’s standard price for new games from EA, greater Microsoft (id, Bethesda, Obsidian, 343, etc), SqEnix, and WB
Which is bullshit. It reminds me of when web email services offered ridiculously small inbox sizes, such as 25MB or 50MB. Then in came Google and offered 1GB, and all of a sudden all those companies found the way to match Google’s offering.
But I guess if people are willing to pay for those ridiculous prices, and deal with in-game payments… shrug.
Because you have the full choice to not buy and support it, if you think the price is unreasonable. It’s not a vital need, and nobody’s forcing customers to buy it. Housing, food, healthcare, we don’t have a choice. Buy or die. A video game? Not so much. The issue is not game publishers overcharging, it’s players who moan and whine… AND THEN BUY IT ANYWAY, thus ensuring the publishers will continue the practice
Sure, but are we talking about people who buy the game, or people in general bashing at the price? They’re not necessarily the same group.
It’s like when Apple announced that $1000 monitor stand. It was laughable. Even if I won’t buy one, I bashed it to no end, because it was fun.
This is a brand new game, they just gave it a confusing name
People are complaining because they don’t like a thing, that’s fine. Same as you’re complaining in this post. Call companies out on their bullshit. Also don’t buy bullshit, that’s a good point too.
Because it doesn’t qualify as bullshit. Company made a product, set a price. Either you find it worth the price or not, but either way what’s the reason to kick up a fuss over an optional good
Company also sold pre-orders for a product, which means people can’t really decide whether the product is exactly what they want until they get it. At which point they complain, because they trusted the company not to sell a sub-par product. What is your issue?
? The complaint right now is about the price, not the quality of the product. Are you saying they didn’t know the price when they preordered it?
On a side note, preorders are a scam. If you’re dumb enough to preorder a game in unlimited supply, that’s on you.
My guy, the complaint is about the price because of the quality. Or, as you are asking, are you saying people didn’t know the price when they bought it?
I agree that pre-orders are a scam, but it’s shitty to say “you knew what you bought!” when some people literally couldn’t.
I’m not saying they knew what they bought, I’m saying it’s on them for choosing to buy before they knew what they were buying. Seriously, people need to take responsibility for their choices already.
Earlier you said:
Now you’re saying it’s on people who pre-order. Can’t we stop pushing this on the consumer and start demanding better from the manufacturers? Why can they sell shitty products, instead of being held to higher standards?
It probably cost more in development to port the game to Switch than any other console. Graphics quality is irrelevant when users willingly buy a device with worse hardware than consoles. This seems like a case of “fans” wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
But it also puts it closer to the mobile market than console, especially given that the switch essentially has a mobile soc
You’re one of the first people I’ve seen use the cake metaphor correctly.
ʘ‿ʘ
To all people who buy switch and say it’s not about the graphics, it’s about the experience, this is what you get.
I’m not criticizing them saying this , I’m just making a point that switch as inferior hardware and you can’t expect to have the game with the same graphics as ps5. The game price is not tied to the graphics, it’s tired to the amount of work they had to put in it, which I’m sure is a lot
Experience expensive
Realistically it’s entirely possible it took more platform specific work to make the switch version viable than anything else.
It’s not their fault it’s lesser hardware.
Yeah I looked and idk what to say - it looks like a switch game.
If you bought a switch, which was an extremely underpowered when it was released 6 years ago, and then get upset when AAA games releasing on current gen consoles look like dogshit… You have nobody to blame but yourself.
Isn’t a PS5 vs Switch comparison kind of like a PS4 vs Wii comparison? They’re not even the same hardware generation, it’s a wonder they’re even dedicating resources to this.
It’s possible, but that’s wild speculation, and I think pretty unlikely.
It’s their fault for releasing a 70$ game on “lesser hardware” while not spending the time to get it working and looking well-enough. They didn’t have to release it.
It’s not wild speculation. The CPU is 20 tiers worse than dogshit and getting anything that’s even a hint of demanding to even function at all on it is a lot of work.
And yet Nintendo releases plenty of games on it that work fine
What’s your point? It’s absolutely possible to make fun games that are simple and not demanding.
It’s also extremely limiting. The vast majority of recent games can’t possibly be made to run on anything anywhere close to as underpowered as the Switch.
I am just annoyed when people say the switch hardware is shit. It’s not shit, it’s just a completely different approach, that’s all. Also it’s annoying you’re using one of the shittiest ports ever to push this idea. They could have built this game from the ground up for switch and had something that looked and ran good. But that wasn’t their plan. The plan was a half assed port.
But it actually is obscenely underpowered, even for mobile, and the CPU is a massive limitation that keeps the vast majority of last gen games from being possible.
It changed the space by showing low end open world games on handheld were possible, but it hit its ceiling extremely quickly. There’s a reason most AAA games didn’t support it, and it’s because it isn’t capable.
I have a PC, PS5, and Switch, and never felt like the Switch was underpowered. Samewise, my phone doesn’t feel underpowered compared to my laptop, because I recognise they’re completely different devices.
You don’t get a Switch to play the latest God of War, you get it to play Mario and Zelda games, and cute lo-fi indie games
Yeah I am a switch owner and also play on my Mac and on Windows with virtual machines, and the majority of switch ports are just garbage and should not have been released. I paid for the outer worlds on switch and it was awful, just a loading screen simulator.
Yes in a world that expects hardware to always get better and software to always be written sloppily and/or assuming those constant improvements I guess it makes sense to be angry at one of the greatest game consoles ever created
Remember when games used a few KB of memory and they did smart things to make that work? No you probably don’t because you’d be angered by that hardware’s existence
that’s why most games choose not to release on it. this is still a greedy decision.
The game doesn’t cost them less and probably costs them more. Discounting it because the hardware is bad is not fair, rational, or reasonable.
the point isn’t that it should cost less, it’s that it shouldn’t have been released to begin with AND it costs more than most games. the price isn’t really the problem, it just compounds on it to make it all seem worse.
So they’d rather not have the option of running the game on their bad hardware?
Why not just not buy it?
Believe me that’s going to happen too. But it was still a mistake to release it on Switch if they couldn’t be arsed.
No, it is wild speculation. Turning off graphical effects etc. until you get acceptable frame rates isn’t hard and doesn’t take long, definitely not as long as implementing them for the other consoles.
You don’t need to rebuild the game because the CPU is slower.
Graphical effects have never been the problem. They’re completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.
CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.
What? This whole topic is about the lower quality of MK1 on the switch. How is the CPU involved in the graphics of MK1? You’ll need to share a source that this is the problem.
Please share a source, or at least a detailed description of what exactly the CPU is too slow for to run MK1 with higher quality. It sure as hell isn’t involved in shader execution, which is where most of the graphical fidelity comes from (if you’re developing a game post 2000).
The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can’t do math. There’s no way to mitigate that.
It’s also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.
Yes, which is why the CPU isn’t the problem. It’s the GPU.
Please share a source for this. A game like MK1 doesn’t need a lot of CPU power, because there just isn’t anything complicated happening. It’s all GPU that’s missing.
Am not an expert but i think particles and physics are both calculated by the CPU. Both very intensive tasks. Graphic wise, from looking at the screenshot above, it seems they only lowered the quality of model and it looks awful because they went for realism. The not so easy fixable problem is the characters design, Switch games look cartoonish for a reason.
Physics are calculated by the CPU, but a game like MK1 doesn’t have many physics to calculate - almost everything is pre-made animations. Particles are updated by the CPU, but rendered by the GPU.
And yeah, that’s why my point was that it’s not the CPU that is limiting the graphics.
It doesn’t look like a hardware issue. Yes, the less powerful hardware is what forced graphical changes, but it looks like an art direction problem.
The changes mostly fail to capture the essence of the original design. The characters look like they were ripped from the SIMs.
No one is expecting the same lighting, textures, or poly counts, but they do expect something that looks like Mortal Combat. That isn’t an unreasonable expectation.
You’re right that this may be a budgeting issue of sorts, but if they can’t set aside enough resources to make it look like some sort of Mortal Combat game, then maybe they shouldn’t have made the port.