Mortal Kombat was designed from day one as a robust, fully-featured online experience, said the NetherRealm development team during a conference call with PlayStation Universe.
"During pre-production, we basically planned around online and all the cool features we wanted," said Adam Urbano, senior producer of Mortal Kombat. "…the online play — which is really, really, really lag-free — would not have been possible if we didn’t start two years ago in front of the basic technology."
Since online fighting games live and die by their net code, the Mortal Kombat online team developed code that pulls "every possible bit" of gameplay data and sends it in individual packets. The end result of two years of planning is a system that’s as efficient as possible, ensuring the best possible online connection between two players.
"We do a lot of things, too, to ensure that the net conditions between multiple players are perfect and ideal for a match-up," added Urbano. "Obviously, there’s nothing you can do if two people have a crappy connection — the game just isn’t going to be as good as if there’s a good connection — but we’ve optimized it as much as an engine can possibly be optimized."
Gamers can hop online and bash some heads when Mortal Kombat hits store shelves on April 19, 2011 in North America and April 21, 2011 in Europe.