Mortal Kombat: Deception - Development

Development

Series co-creator Ed Boon wanted Deception to be an unpredictable fighting game that gave players new features "they could never imagine". In order to do it, the Midway Staff listened to fans on bulletin boards to know what to work on for Deception, such as the playable characters. Wanting to surprise fans as well as to make the game more deep, they added the puzzle and chess game. Boon and John Podlasek supervised the staff, which was divided into teams to work on different areas of the game. A concern from them was to maintain the flavor from the MK series as they wanted the game's violence to make it a more realistic fighting game rather than "a fighting simulator". Character appearances were improved to make their moves be "more responsive" to the player's input. They also wanted to bring back several characters they felt were absent for too long including Sindel, Nightwolf, Baraka and Mileena. Developers also wanted an arena with several weapons which players can use to fight; however, it was remade to become the Liu Kang's Tomb arena. Characters' combos were redesigned to be distinct so that they would be more important due to the fact Boon noted that they were necessary for any move the player would like to use to make more damage to an opponent. The Midway Staff focused on the designs and functions of the backgrounds, wanting to make them be as influential to the outcome of the battle as the fighting between characters.

Because of the popular demand and favorable reception of Deadly Alliance, the number of finishing moves, known as fatalities, increased to two per character. The fatalities were developed by a group of animators led by Carlos Pesina. They comically considered Mileena's fatality in which she eats the opponents' neck as the most disturbing one due to how her "sexy moves" are modeled from Pesina. The hara-kiri moves were added to allow the losers to perform a finishing move, creating a race between both players. The death-traps, meant to be introduced in the first game, were added to give the combat more strategy as well as to give more chances to players to win a fight if they are in disadvantage. The game was originally meant to have other new finishing moves, such as tortures and falling cliffs similar to fatalities.

One of the main features to Deception was the emphasis on online gameplay, which had yet to become common for console fighting games. A team of engineers spent almost a full year to decide if the feature was viable. The MK team focused their energies solely on platforms that had strong online functionality available to the end consumer; this led to a tight focus on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions. Because GameCube games require a bit of re-engineering versus the other platforms when porting, it was decided to exclude the GameCube from the work of the team until the online hurdles were cleared. Some time after the game's release, Boon commented that he was disappointed that the GameCube version did not feature online gameplay as he regarded it as "the best in the business".

Details about the game were first confirmed to the general public in the May 2003 issue of PlayStation: The Official Magazine, in which the game was known as Mortal Kombat VI, and an online mode was confirmed. On February 6, 2004, Midway registered the domain names mkdeception.com and mortalkombatdeception.com. When the IGN staff asked Midway Entertainment if Mortal Kombat: Deception was the official title, the developers gave no answers. However, later that month, Midway released the first trailer from the game, confirming the title as Mortal Kombat: Deception.