I’m labbing this game because I’m planning a series of large-scale changes I would make to the game’s systems and balance. I am doing this because I am insane. I don’t even know if some of the changes I’d propose are within the realm of possibility for a mod or anything, but y’know, shoot for the moon, right?
Anyway, a lot of interactions at this game were understood at a very basic level, but weren’t given a whole lot of exploration because the practical effects were enough when you’re just trying to play the game, but this lead to some misconceptions about how these particular interactions work. For example…
The “Universal Tracking” Bug Isn’t Really A Bug
One of the more prolific aspects of competitive Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance is the “universal tracking” exploit. Players found that if you pressed up while performing a move (e.g. Scorpion u+3), your move would track sidesteps even if it didn’t do so normally. As far as players were concerned, this was just a bug - something about pressing up with a move would make it track.
After fiddling around with the timings of sidesteps and the up + attack input itself, I’ve found out what’s actually happening: sidewalk continually reorients your character’s facing direction towards your opponent, so if you perform an attack out of a sidewalk, then you never have an opportunity to go off-axis, so your attack will “track” the opponent. It’s similar in principle to Julia Chang being able to make her ff+1 dashing elbow attack “track” an opponent’s sidestep by delaying the button input, since dashing in Tekken similarly reorients your character’s facing direction towards your opponent.
Everything Is Minus On Block, But Impales Are Plus On Whiff
You may be surprised to learn that Mortal Kombat took a very long time to learn what blockstun was. Throughout the classic era of the franchise (the first game through to Mortal Kombat 4), moves didn’t really have frame data, because they didn’t force your opponent to stay blocking for a certain amount of time - what mattered was the fact that it actually took time to leave your blocking stance (called “block release”), much like how it takes time to release your shield in Super Smash Bros. There wasn’t really blockstun so much as there was a difference in time between a move’s recovery and when you were able to block release.
In Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance, the principle is largely the same, with a couple of small exceptions. The first is that whenever your opponent performs an attack while you’re stand blocking, your character will cycle through four different blocking stances, with a small animation between each - these animations leave your character inactionable, but your character will enter the next stance immediately upon a move making contact, so this doesn’t really lead to situations where you can’t block a low in time or anything like that.
The second exception is that you are not inactionable during your block release animation. Combined with the fact that attacks do not actually cause blockstun, this basically means almost every single attack in the game is minus (possibly even punishable) on block, which is a big part of why competitive MKDA is so focused on singular pokes instead of string pressure.
However, this also leads to the other scruple that shows up as a result of the way MKDA handles blocking: a handful of characters, while in their weapon fighting style, have access to a move where they impale their opponent with their weapon. Going for an impale is very rarely a good idea (largely because you don’t get to use your weapon any more, since it’s stuck in your opponent), but it just so happens that if you perform an impale without making contact with your opponent, if they’re blocking, they’ll shift into the next blocking pose at about half the speed they normally would. And since shifting your block pose leaves you inactionable, you’re basically stuck in this animation, thus making the impale technically plus on whiff. And it still sucks.
Though it’s also worth mentioning that this slowed down block pose shift animation also applies to stand guarding Jax’s unblockable ground pound special, which means if he performs it while you’re blocking, the ground pound is guaranteed, which is a bit better than the impale.
More updates from the MKDA mines
Addendum post 2023.07.17
As part of my stupid pie in the sky Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance balance mod research, I’ve been trying to figure out how combo damage scaling works in this game, since one of the major things I’d like to do is increase combo damage across the board. I was under the impression that this game would operate on similar rules as Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 and Mortal Kombat 4, in that certain moves would activate “damage protection” on hit, which would halve the damage of all subsequent attacks in the combo. I was sort of right. Here’s what I’ve found:
- There is damage protection (50% damage) and double damage protection (25% damage), but this appears to actually work in tandem with a more standard per-hit damage scaling formula that applies to juggle combos. There also appears to be a separate per-hit damage scaling formula behind grounded attack strings that scales damage at a different rate to the airborne scaling. I do not know how to peek into the game far enough to figure out what the formula is, nor am I good enough at mathematics to figure out what it might be. Please help.
- Character life pools in this game are stored internally as a floating point value rather than a 2-byte integer like I’m used to from other fighting games. This seemed insane to me at first, but I suppose it makes a good bit of sense when you’re working with a game that internally measures damage values as percentages?