Welcome to the MKO forums. I look forward to posting alongside you.

Thats a really great idea. I feel It may not happen in reality for creative reasons. It seems that endings are used to take as many avenues as possible so when lets say MK10 comes along. they can say "OK what are we going to keep/follow?"

I like your idea and would love to see it implimented. But endings are never known whether to be Canon or not until the following game, thus more than one ending might be for nothing and scrapped if they choose not to persue it. Where if they create 2 different endings. Theres twice as much plot to choose from.

I cannot wait to see hte endings nonetheless even if they arent FMV.


-Casselman

Thanks for welcoming me. Actually, I've already posted more than once here, but for some reason my visits count never changes (I kind of like it, it's funny).



I think I got a bit misunderstood, which is possible since English is not my first language, so my sentence construction is not perfect. Anyway, to clear things up, I meant this:

Ashrah and Nitara would have 1 (not 2 different) common ending that you would unlock after beating the arcade/story mode with both of them. In that ending, Ashrah ALWAYS kills Nitara. That basically means that Nitara gets killed in her ending. There would not be 2 different versions of the ending. This way we would know right away what exactly happened.

Hopefully that helps.

You were understood very clearly. What I mean is.

OK Im Ed Boon. Im creating MK9 endings. I would say "Ok lets make 25 endings for the characters (because there is 25 characters this game in this situation(not a fact)). So IF they did multiple character endings, that means there REALLY only 12-13 endings for 25 characters making it much harder to have a variety to choose which are real or fake, thus only having about 6 Canon/real endings come MK10 in terms of story.

BUT

If Ed Boon sais "Im gonna create one ending per character.' then theres double to choose form and we have lets say 12-15 Canon endings going forward.

Keeping in mind that its usually WAY less than 50% of the endings that are canon.

What im trying to say is, Boon would rather have every character have a unique ending so he has (in this situation) 25 endings to choose from rather than 12...

Just for variety and creative juices. I feel its best to have Every ending we possibly can. Immagine if MKDA diddnt have the Reptile Ending where he became the dragon king and instead, he was tied into nitaras dumb ending.

MKD may not have happened as we know it because that is CLEARLY one ending that they chose to keep. If it never had existed, who knows where wed be? Same goes for Scorpion and the Soulnado ending in MKDA. MKD would have changed very much.

-Casselman

Great idea! First and foremost, I love the idea of having canon endings for everyone. I still believe that you can take those endings in different directions in the next game, so I don't know how bound you'd be creatively. I mean, let's face it, as Ed Boon often says... "No one really stays dead in Mortal Kombat."

Just by that statement alone, you can still go in a variety of directions in MK10 (or 9 or 8 or whatever you want to call the sequel to the next game). In MK vs DC, there seemed to be something similar to what you're talking about in terms of stories crossing over between characters. I remember several scenes getting reused, which made sense in terms of the story being told.

I also like the idea of common endings because it ties stories together. I like the idea of MK having a fluid story structure, so at the end, when you've beaten the game with every character, you can get a picture of what really happened in this game in terms of the stories and characters.

I said a while back that it would be very cool if the MK team basically made one long movie (and it could be in game, it doesn't have to be a CG cut scene or whatever) and then cut up in a logical way so that each character was dealt with.

Now, in order to do that, you'd most likely have to give each person a begining cut scene, a middle cut scene and an ending cut scene. But the idea wouldn't simply be "a movie cut up for everyone." The idea would flow from each other, so that they'd make sense as both individual stories and a complete picture/movie of what happened and how everything played out.

Regardless, since I doubt we'd see that (even though Twisted Metal: Black, a PS2 launch title, could somehow manage it...) something like what you're saying is easily the next best thing.

I'd love to see canon endings (God, I'm beyond sick of the stupid "what if" endings) where stories overlap and the characters really merge to form these cohesive stories about what happened in the tournament. So yeah, I love this idea!

I will say this though... I think that it would be cool to do one of two things here, since we'd obviously be getting a lot less in the sheer number of endings:

1) Have ending extensions... ie, take your example of Ashrah and Nitara. Say Nitara kills Ashrah (when you beat the game as Nitara). But then, when you beat the game with Ashrah, you see Nitara's ending, but then maybe you see something possess Ashrah, and she comes back to life and kills Nitara, then she places her kriss weapon at an alter and says something like "I am ready to do your bidding Quan Chi..." or something like that.

Of course, in order to do this... You'd have to have an MK:DA or MK:D style of character select screen where half of the characters are hidden. Once you beat the game with a character, you unlock the character that corresponds to their ending. So naturally, Nitara would unlock Ashrah as a playable character.

Doesn't seem to difficult, and I'd like to see what they could do with that style of storytelling. I think that it could be fantastic!

2) Have LONG endings: If we're only going to have maybe 12 endings, then they need to be worth the price of admission, especially if we have to beat the game twice to see one of these endings. So you'd beat the game with Nitara and Ashrah and then you'd see that whole ending with the extension that I was talking about.

Honestly? I'd be fine either way, so long as this helped the storytelling become more cohesive, provide coherant and CANON endings that could help lead in to the next game or decide feuds once and for all or kill off characters etc.

I think it's a great idea, and I'd love to see something like this if the MK team could do it correctly.

I like the idea, Mr. Nephrite. This is something I've wanted to see in MK for a long time. It wouldn't be that hard to do. You decide on your characters, decide on their stories, decide what you're going to do for the next game, and then you work it all in together. I feel that this would really bring out MK's strong story, would focus it, and with a plan, would allow MK to raise its game a little bit.

The "decide on what you're going to do for the next game" bit is where things become difficult, though. That's something the MK Team have never really specialised in, and let's face it -- story is, sadly, not always one of the team's most prominent focuses.

Casselman is right in saying that it is not likely, I feel; but I hope that they do try to make every ending as canonical as possible, just to make things tidier. One idea I've had in the past is a "victory" ending -- which is the often non-canonical "what if this character was successful" ending -- and then they had a "true ending." The true ending could be unlocked even via downloadable content, or only by completing the game with every character. For example:

Baraka may have an ending where he defeats the new villain to lead the Tarkatan race into a new age. Fair enough. But once you complete the game with everyone, you can select Baraka's true ending, which tells you that Baraka was confronted and killed by Kung Lao.

I hope we get FMV endings for each character, or even endings with just real-time in game models (since a lot of games are going that route on 360 and ps3). Even the Deception endings were okay.

Just PLEASE do not do the recycled endings used in Armageddon! PLEASE!

: )

Correct, that's what I meant, BUT...



That's not what I meant. How I pictured it, every single ending would be real, there wouldn't be any fake ones. That way it would be easier to follow the story because everything that happened in the endings of a particular game would actually happen, it would be real. Sure, you wouldn't have to continue all of the sub-plots (endings) in the next game, but those endings that you decided to leave aside for the next game still happened, they would still count. Some of those endings could be the ending point of a certain sub-plot or the story of those endings could be continued in MK12 for example. My point is, all endings would be true.



And that's exactly why I came up with this idea in which all endings would be canon. It would make it easier to follow the story, especially to the fans that didn't follow MK's story from the day one (like me, for example).



That's a good example which can create confusion to people who are trying to get to know MK's story. Let's say someone goes to buy his first ever MK game and he/she buys MKDA and ends up liking Reptile. He/she wouldn't really know what actually happened with their favorite character in that game. And that's where this "canon endings formula" helps- Reptile would be in only one ending and whatever happened to him in that ending would be true and you would know right away his fate, you wouldn't have to play the next game to learn what happened with him.



Exactly.



One long movie sounds cool too, but my problem with that is let's say I only want to check out what happened with Ashrah. Would I have to watch the entire movie just to see what happened with one character? So, I think there should be more shorter clips only involving characters from a certain sub-plot. However, if as a bonus, there was to be also a movie combining all of the character clips into one, I definitely wouldn't mind. So yeah, there would also need to be some beginning and middle cut scenes for the whole thing to make sense. That movie could be like a final thing you unlock, after you have completed the game 100%.



I'm not sure how would this work when there are more then 2 characters involved in a common ending. Also, with the ending extensions, they would have to be really careful to not make the whole thing repetitive. What I mean by this is, let's say that stuff with Ashrah and Nitara happens like you said. Now lets' bring in let's say Jade and Rain. In Jade's ending she kills/injures Rain, then in Rain's extended version he comes back and kills Jade. See what I mean, I'm afraid that the whole thing could suffer from being repetitive or predictable.



Thanks!



Thanks! Yeah, I think this idea with "victory endings" and "true endings" solves that issue with possible repetitive nature of endings+extensions like Baraka407 suggested. Because here, the "victory ending" could be totally different from the "true ending", so you'd basically have no idea what's really in store for Baraka until you get to the true ending.



Same here.



That could work too, but then, what if both characters were left out from the next game. Having to wait for yet another game to find out what really happened would be a bit annoying as well, I fear.

I like that idea, but if I had it my way you would only get that award by beating the story mode of that character for a CGI end battle featuring all the characters involved. you could also get a different ending in the arcade mode that stays to the formula of the "what if" endings that we've seen in previous games.