Quality of Life Settings to Improve Your MK1 Experience

While Mortal Kombat 1 is a fairly straightforward game, it still has quite a few options that can make your life easier, so let's briefly go over some of the most important ones.

Starting with how you interact with the game – the inputs. In the gameplay tab, you'll find a "Release Check" option. This is what's commonly known as negative edge, which means that the game will register release of a button as a press of the button. Getting twice the input might sound nice, but it can also potentially cause issues when you don't have clean inputs or there's an overlap between normal and special moves. Unless you specifically require it for certain techs, it's best to give yourself more control and keep this on "off".

Many people play fighting games on the keyboard, and while the controls set up for gamepads is essentially flawless, the same can't be said for the default keyboard setup. While we all have different hands and keyboards, let me propose this set-up and explain it. For movement, ASD + Space emulates the hitbox setup. This way, each of your movement keys is tied to a specific finger, instead of your middle finger being responsible for both up and down. Block on Shift doesn't impede any of your other functions and should be a comfortable button for your pinky to press, especially for experienced PC players.

Now, about the other buttons. UIO/JKL is a fairly common set up for fighting games on the keyboard, it also helps that J has that nice ridge to let you locate the key quickly. Since throws and Kameo buttons are used most often, they are sitting on the side, for your ring finger. Only a few characters actually utilize the stance switch mechanic, but Y should be a reasonably easy button to hit, even in more intense Nitara combos.

Moving onto Video & Audio, less of a QoL and more of a PSA, your mic and your opponent's mics are on by default. If you don't want the opponents to hear you fart during a combo or don't want to hear their TV in the background, you should set both of these on mute.

Last, we have the graphics settings, and all of this will largely depend on your individual setup. All I can say is that texture quality and shadow quality will have the largest impact on your resources. Past that, much will rest on ambient occlusion and your antialiasing method of choice. If you're using lower end hardware, going for upscaling will give you the best shot at drastically improving the performance, as you will be rendering the game at a much lower resolution and then letting the algorithm upscale it for you.

Hopefully you found something useful in this article, thank you for reading!