The Launch of Mortal Kombat Legacy Kollection Is a Disaster

Last week, Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection has finally released after much anticipation from the fans, but even prior to coming out there was one big red flag.

Despite people asking plenty of questions, Digital Eclipse only clarified the online functionality a day before release, when it was revealed that player lobbies, a key part of online fighting games, will not be available on release.

Since then, people have been thoroughly combing through the collections, and finding more flaws. The quality of online matches especially has been rough. A lot of players reported awful audio buffer issues, which could only be fixed with increased input lag.

The offline quality has also suffered, with input delay that be felt even in the menus. This varies from platform to platform, but overall it's obvious that the game is far less responsive across the board than it should be.

The collection is not free of game specific issues either, with MK4 displaying some emulation specific bugs where characters phase through each other in certain scenarios.

And there is so much more to this. The MKLK has some factual errors regarding the rosters of prior games. One person reported crashing after removing an OST track from their favorites. Another has gotten MK2 matches while trying to queue for MK3. There's even a bizarre bug that makes the music switch after performing a specific move.

At this point, it's hard to say if this assortment of issues was just down to excessively punishing deadlines, or if there was also a fair bit of oversight involved. Even though this release is fundamentally great in what it offers, the quality of those offerings needs so much polish, and it's incredibly disappointing that this was not reflected in the pre-release coverage or the review scores.

Credit where credit is due, however. Stephen Frost, the head of production at Digital Eclipse, has been exceptionally active on social media, ensuring players that their issues are heard, and will be addressed.

The company has already rolled out a patch on Steam that should fix some of the glaring issues with audio and MK4 emulation bugs.

Sadly, many other issues still remain. On Steam in particular, the online connectivity has been disastrous, with some players simply being unable to find any matches. Digital Eclipse has looked into this, but it appears that this specific problem is not within the game, but has something to do with how Steam handles online infrastructure, so they have already reached out to Valve for a potential solution.