Mortal Kombat Devs traumatised by creating the gore in the game

[CritialGaming]

Nobody has yet answered the question as to why someone would sign up to work on Mortal Kombat if they were bothered by having to render, animate, draw, or detail gore? And if you were bothered by it, why sign up to work for the company in the first damn place?

This is what I don't understand and this is also what separates the other professions that people brought up. Police, Medical professionals, Soldiers, etc, these people know that horrific shit is part of the package when you sign up for the job. You know it is coming, and they still go into these professions. That doesn't mean that things can't affect you because you signed up for it, but you'll also never see them complain about what they had to do for their job.

No trama surgeon is complaining to newpapers that they had to save someone's life who had been shot, or stabbed, or torn up by a car accident. No cop is going to complain the the police chief forced him to stop a robbery, or whatever.

This just screams as a sensationalistic article for clicks.

 

[Erttheking]

Nobody has yet answered the question as to why someone would sign up to work on Mortal Kombat if they were bothered by having to render, animate, draw, or detail gore? And if you were bothered by it, why sign up to work for the company in the first damn place?

The problem people are having is that watching ACTUAL gore is nowhere near the same as fictional gore.

Also you bring up a trauma surgeon comparison when someone who actually works in the medical field (IE, knows more than you) has been repeatedly smacking that comparison down as shallow.

 

[Saint of M]

Nobody has yet answered the question as to why someone would sign up to work on Mortal Kombat if they were bothered by having to render, animate, draw, or detail gore? And if you were bothered by it, why sign up to work for the company in the first damn place?

The problem people are having is that watching ACTUAL gore is nowhere near the same as fictional gore.

Also you bring up a trauma surgeon comparison when someone who actually works in the medical field (IE, knows more than you) has been repeatedly smacking that comparison down as shallow.

I read the article and can see this as well. We all drew pictures as kids of us showing hat happens when an Ax enters a skull, we all read a violent scene or saw one on the screen and thought was awsome, and pulling off a few fatalities is very rewarding. However to make them look real you have to look through lots of images and videos of the actual body trauma and after a while the designer probably couldn't deal with inflicting those kind of wounds, even digitally, on another creature.

That healthy little barrier between reality and fantasy was gone for him, and this will will most likely be more common place as gaming evolves visually.

Its kinda like cooking a hamburger vs killing, cleaning, and getting the desired parts for the patty.

 

[WindKnight]

The long and short of it is we?re not living in a fantasy world, and human nature is an imperfect at best. In order for us to thrive, something else will undoubtedly end up suffering or outright perishing. While we may make valiant attempts at balancing the scales of moral equity they will always be tilting one way or another. It?s a curse to be sure, but for anyone that has ever put much thought into the cost of effectively sanitizing the world of all its ills, by contrast it starts to look like more of a blessing.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

The long and short of it is we?re not living in a fantasy world, and human nature is an imperfect at best. In order for us to thrive, something else will undoubtedly end up suffering or outright perishing. While we may make valiant attempts at balancing the scales of moral equity they will always be tilting one way or another. It?s a curse to be sure, but for anyone that has ever put much thought into the cost of effectively sanitizing the world of all its ills, by contrast it starts to look like more of a blessing.

I?m sorry, but what the fuck does this pseudo-philosophical bullshit have to do with a fairly straightforward duty of care failure by a company towards its employees?

 

[Cicada 5]

To the people going "why would you sign up for this knowing it's MK?":

I've been fan of the MK franchise for years and never once assumed the developers had to rely on real life videos and images of violence for reference points. The gore was so over the top and cartoonish to assume they were going for real life. Hell, the way the characters react to fatalities isn't realistic so the watching real life videos thing isn't even necessary. Hell, it was assumed the violence was based on stuff seen in movies. Kung Lao's hat slice fatality was inspired by the villain from a James Bond movie and I think Kitana's fatality where she kisses someone and they explode into chunks was based on the fate of a villain from another James Bond movie. I can't imagine any of these people signed up for working on MK knowing they'd be subject to this.

 

[WindKnight]

The long and short of it is we?re not living in a fantasy world, and human nature is an imperfect at best. In order for us to thrive, something else will undoubtedly end up suffering or outright perishing. While we may make valiant attempts at balancing the scales of moral equity they will always be tilting one way or another. It?s a curse to be sure, but for anyone that has ever put much thought into the cost of effectively sanitizing the world of all its ills, by contrast it starts to look like more of a blessing.

I?m sorry, but what the fuck does this pseudo-philosophical bullshit have to do with a fairly straightforward duty of care failure by a company towards its employees?

Not excusing the practice, just declaring the symptoms. Human beings often have flawed reasoning, regardless of our perceived or actual capacity for using it well. All one has to do is acknowledge our biased accounts of history which resign it to perpetuity. We also aren?t exactly designed for contentment or modesty and often resort to self destructive behavior, however unintentional its origins may often be.

 

[Xprimentyl]

So, the last Mortal Kombat I actually played was MK3, then I fell off of the genre altogether. Welp, this little nugget came across my YouTube feed and I must say, if the employees weren't traumatized, I'd be surprised. Mortal Kombat has certainly grown up... into the sick, twisted psychopath the small animal killing and fire starting in its adolescent years would have logically led anyone to believe it would. Man, some of these are SICK. I don't know what kinds of actual graphic violence they had to watch to inspire this stuff, but yeesh...

 

[WindKnight]

Not going to watch the above video because, well, not big into gore, I but a remember one from the more recent games where the victim was dragged struggling and screaming crotch-first over a saw blade until their split in half, and the two halves held up like a butchered carcass, and it felt a bit much.

I mean, the games I remember had heads being punched off or pulled off with spines attached, people being incinerated, hearts ripped out. It was all cartoony, lo-fi stuff and over in a flash. But that one really came across as too much

 

[Thaluikhain]

So, the last Mortal Kombat I actually played was MK3, then I fell off of the genre altogether. Welp, this little nugget came across my YouTube feed and I must say, if the employees weren't traumatized, I'd be surprised. Mortal Kombat has certainly grown up... into the sick, twisted psychopath the small animal killing and fire starting in its adolescent years would have logically led anyone to believe it would. Man, some of these are SICK. I don't know what kinds of actual graphic violence they had to watch to inspire this stuff, but yeesh...

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

 

[WindKnight]

So, the last Mortal Kombat I actually played was MK3, then I fell off of the genre altogether. Welp, this little nugget came across my YouTube feed and I must say, if the employees weren't traumatized, I'd be surprised. Mortal Kombat has certainly grown up... into the sick, twisted psychopath the small animal killing and fire starting in its adolescent years would have logically led anyone to believe it would. Man, some of these are SICK. I don't know what kinds of actual graphic violence they had to watch to inspire this stuff, but yeesh...

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

Well when they?re on the 11th main iteration and they continually sell like hotter and hotter hot cakes, they?ve officially painted themselves into a very lucrative corner of having to outdo the previous time around. At least the rest of the game (where the actual gameplay is) has also followed suit.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well when they?re on the 11th main iteration and they continually sell like hotter and hotter hot cakes, they?ve officially painted themselves into a very lucrative corner of having to outdo the previous time around.

Well, they could rip-off Minecraft or Call of Duty instead, that was quite popular for a bit.

Ok, yeah, not many options beyond worse gore.

 

[Xprimentyl]

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

That?s the exact thought I had. Doesn?t really bother me, like, I?m not offended or think they need to tone it down, just mostly shocked at how extreme a caricature of itself MK has become; it?s basically what lawmakers feared in the early ?90s. All I can say is if I was a non-gaming parent, and I walked in and saw my kids playing a game in which characters are reaching into violently exposed body cavities to plant explosives or impaling people through the mouth before splitting their heads in half long ways, all in slow motion and fairly respectably realistic, I?d have some? questions.

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

Well when they?re on the 11th main iteration and they continually sell like hotter and hotter hot cakes, they?ve officially painted themselves into a very lucrative corner of having to outdo the previous time around. At least the rest of the game (where the actual gameplay is) has also followed suit.

This is kinda my point; if you?re going down in history as THE franchise that caused the need for the maturity rating scale due to extreme depictions of violence, 11 games later, the laurels you can rest on and still keep the throne are fewer and fewer. It makes a sick kind of sense.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

To quote Tarantino: you don't go to a Metallica concert and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.

 

[WindKnight]

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

That?s the exact thought I had. Doesn?t really bother me, like, I?m not offended or think they need to tone it down, just mostly shocked at how extreme a caricature of itself MK has become; it?s basically what lawmakers feared in the early ?90s. All I can say is if I was a non-gaming parent, and I walked in and saw my kids playing a game in which characters are reaching into violently exposed body cavities to plant explosives or impaling people through the mouth before splitting their heads in half long ways, all in slow motion and fairly respectably realistic, I?d have some? questions.

*watches the first few*

O...k...right, yeah, that's like they are deliberately trying to be the sort of game people accused them of being some decades back.

Well when they?re on the 11th main iteration and they continually sell like hotter and hotter hot cakes, they?ve officially painted themselves into a very lucrative corner of having to outdo the previous time around. At least the rest of the game (where the actual gameplay is) has also followed suit.

This is kinda my point; if you?re going down in history as THE franchise that caused the need for the maturity rating scale due to extreme depictions of violence, 11 games later, the laurels you can rest on and still keep the throne are fewer and fewer. It makes a sick kind of sense.

I think the biggest challenge for them isn?t simply outdoing the previous time around, but straddling that line of ?That was funny Haha? and ?Ewww that was disgusting?.

 

[Eacaraxe_v1legacy]

Well when they?re on the 11th main iteration and they continually sell like hotter and hotter hot cakes, they?ve officially painted themselves into a very lucrative corner of having to outdo the previous time around. At least the rest of the game (where the actual gameplay is) has also followed suit.

...take the series back to its '70s kung fu grindhouse/exploitation roots and lean hard into camp, as opposed to "realism"? Intentionally bad dubbing, funky camera angles and gaffes, bad special effects, "cheap film and development" color grading, borderline "'70s porn music" bad soundtrack, the whole shebang. Make the game mechanically good, but look like an extremely low-budget movie made by hacks that had an absolute dumpster fire production.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

To quote Tarantino: you don't go to a Metallica concert and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.

I just watched Metallica live in concert exactly one week ago. It was loud. My ears weren't back to normal till Saturday. Great concert too.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

...take the series back to its '70s kung fu grindhouse/exploitation roots and lean hard into camp, as opposed to "realism"? Intentionally bad dubbing, funky camera angles and gaffes, bad special effects, "cheap film and development" color grading, borderline "'70s porn music" bad soundtrack, the whole shebang. Make the game mechanically good, but look like an extremely low-budget movie made by hacks that had an absolute dumpster fire production.

You know what that reminds me of? Kung Fu Chaos. It was one of the first games i had on the XBox back in 2003-2004 ish. It was a brilliant send-up of Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema. It had film grain and levels played out like film scenes, complete with wire-fu, a loud director (named Shao Ting) and it's characters were great chinese/asian martial art mainstays. A ninja, a monkey king, a princess, an old master, etc. Such a great game.

I think the issue isn't the campiness, or however OTT they make it. You have to consider that everything we see on screen took dozens of development hours to make. A simple blood texture might take one artist one week. A more complex one might take one person two weeks. With the advances in graphics, the lowering of what is acceptable in games (remember how controversial the original was?) and the need to top what came before, the fatalities are getting more graphic and outlandish. The artists therefore have to spend hours staring at gruesome and macabre graphics to create all these things.

Yahtzee made a quip in his RDR2 review about how much development time was spent on horse poo and horse penises. One, or several artists, would have had to spend many hours staring at images of horse poop and genitalia, iterated thru many attempts to create the models/animations to get it all just right. So too the violence in MK.

I have a friend who's a paramedic. She has told me the odd story of some of her callouts whenever the subject of the job comes up. She told me once about a grim traffic accident involving a motorcyclist and did so with the same gravity that I would describe forgetting my keys on my desk. Doctors too have deal with sights that must challenge their tolerance too, but they must and do deal with it. I know I'd probably pass out if I saw half the stuff these folks do.

I've seen a couple of the new fatalities and while I never thought I would say it, they are too violent for me. Personally, I even found the Trevor torture scene in GTA5 queasy and borderline unplayable. I will absolutely defend MK's right to be as gruesome as it cares to be, but while I have no qualms in playing most "violent" games you'd care to mention, the sheer level of violence is one of such excess that I can't stomach it. I don't blame devs for being off-put by it. They would have had to animate these things frame-by-frame over the course of days and weeks. They'd have to play it again and again and fine tune it and retest and so on. It has to take a toll.

But would MK be MK without the fatalities?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

To quote Tarantino: you don't go to a Metallica concert and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.

I just watched Metallica live in concert exactly one week ago. It was loud. My ears weren't back to normal till Saturday. Great concert too.

The point being heavy metal's always loud, or at the very least you should expect that.

 

[Abomination]

To quote Tarantino: you don't go to a Metallica concert and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.

I just watched Metallica live in concert exactly one week ago. It was loud. My ears weren't back to normal till Saturday. Great concert too.

The point being heavy metal's always loud, or at the very least you should expect that.

I think the better comparison is that the stage hands should be given appropriate ear protection and not expected to listen to the speakers without said protection for extended periods of time.