Looks like Mortal Kombat 11 was a giant bomb at this year's E3 show. For night 2 of their E3 coverage, Giant Bomb hosts Jeff Gerstmann and Dan Ryckert had a sit-down meeting hosted a panel with several developers, including Ed Boon of NetherRealm Studios, Jacob Mikkelson and Sven Liebold of IO Interactive, and Eric Pope of Ubisoft.

The relevant portion of the video begins in the embedded clip, below:

Of particular interest to Mortal Kombat fans, who may feel disappointed at the news, may be the distinct lack of a Mortal Kombat 11 announcement. This is covered in the beginning of the segment:

Jeff Gerstmann: Ed, no game! What’s going on?

Ed Boon: Well, we’ve had E3s where there’s no game before, in the past.

JG: Definitely.

EB: There’s definitely like a pattern we’ve been following that we’ve kind of broken out of. And I’m surprised how many people know about that pattern. I didn’t think that many people were taking notes—writing it down. But it’s certainly something that we’re changing around. And I wish I could—I’m chomping at the bit to talk about stuff—but at the moment, we have nothing that we’re announcing.

JG [stage whisper] All right, just tell me—is Stryker in it, or what? What are we doing? [normal voice] I mean, that was the cadence for a while. Talk about the game at E3, ship in April type thing—and I feel like Injustice 2, when I started thinking about it, when I started maybe piecing some things together to go, “I don’t think they’re gonna have a game there.” At first I was like, “Aw, man. E3 is cancelled.”

EB: In the past, we’ve released some kind of an announcement trailer right before E3. So when we didn’t do something like that, the death threats started.

In other portions of the discussion, they cover topics like their thoughts on DLC (in both Mortal Kombat X and the Injustice series, as well as games by other publishers entirely, such as Rainbow Six) as well as the challenges of developers responding to feedback by gamers and implementing balance patches and other updates. In addition, they discuss how in times past, the surprise short film/teaser Mortal Kombat: Rebirth impacted their announcement for the Mortal Kombat (2011) reboot, how the Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe crossover laid the groundwork for later MK and Injustice games, the cancelled Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks sequel, Fire and Ice, and they even discussed fan projects such as Pong Kombat. There’s also a bit of a foray into the theoretical crossovers that we’d all love to see—but probably won’t—such as Marvel vs. DC and Mortal Kombat vs. Street Fighter.

Although some fans may be a bit let down that Mortal Kombat 11 is not ready to be revealed at this time, the unstructured nature of discussion makes it entertaining to watch as they cover a variety of topics related to MK’s past, present, and future as well as the occasional drift into other topics entirely. Babalities in For Honor?

Although MK11 may be further behind in the development cycle, the conversation never stops! Register an account and share your thoughts on the forum.