Mortal Kombat 11's PC port should be much better than MKX's was
The last Mortal Kombat game to release on PC was a complete disaster. Constant crashing, inconsistent framerates, and buggy online play ensured a poor reception, the outcry amplified by the comparably smooth performance of the console versions. Weaker proprietary hardware ran Mortal Kombat X better than the best PCs, a fatality of the soul. Of course, a poor port was to blame.
After adopting a new port studio, fixing Mortal Kombat X with the MKXL release, and holding back the PC release of Injustice 2 to ensure it got a better port than MKX did at launch, the team at NetherRealm Studios is confident that Mortal Kombat 11 will be an ideal PC game, and one that'll manage to keep up with the busy update schedule of its console siblings.
"The people that did the XL version of Mortal Kombat X, where it was dramatically improved, they're doing this version also," Lead Designer Paulo Garcia tells me. "And because they've been working with our code engine for the past three years, they've actually become a lot faster."
Those people are Polish QA, localization, and port house QLOC, a studio behind some of the sturdiest PC conversions, like DMC Devil May Cry, Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, Dark Souls Remastered, and, appropriately enough, Injustice 2.
QLOC first came on board to bring the Mortal Kombat XL update to PC, taking over port duties from High Voltage Software. The update was something of a surprise, arriving months after its release on consoles and the announcement that PC support for Mortal Kombat X was done for, effectively cancelling XL and the last character pack.
The main goal is to make sure that [Mortal Kombat 11] is the exact same game on all platforms.
Paulo Garcia, Lead Designer
But when Creative Director Ed Boon threw out a Twitter poll asking what people wanted from Mortal Kombat X next and the response was swift and strong: the previously cancelled updates and DLC on PC. XL released on PC a few months later thanks to QLOC, leaving Mortal Kombat X in a much better state. As of this writing, the bulk of recent Steam reviews make far fewer references to performance problems.
Injustice 2 was the next collaboration between the Mortal Kombat team and QLOC. The project streamlined their collaborative processes and, though Injustice 2 took an extra six months to release on PC, brought ongoing PC support much closer to NetherRealm's in-house console development cadence.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com