It appears that it has been a confusion lately as to what engine the latest Mortal Kombat game, Mortal Kombat 11, uses. While we knew that the game was based on a custom Unreal Engine 3 version, some people thought that the game would be using Unreal Engine 4. As such, NetherRealm Studios Programming Lead Jon Greenberg has shed some light on what exactly is going on here.
As Greenberg stated, the current-gen version of Mortal Kombat 11 uses NetherRealm’s custom Unreal Engine 3 which appears to be – like pretty much all custom engines – radically different than what Epic Games is currently offering.
To whoever keeps changing the Mortal Kombat 11 Wikipedia page to claim the game uses UE4… while I appreciate the intention and while we take this as a compliment, MK11 is built on NRS's custom UE3 version. And yes, our ver of UE3 is radically different from Epic's at this pt.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 5, 2019
On the other hand, the mobile version of Mortal Kombat 11 will be indeed using Unreal Engine 4.
Yup. Mobile is using UE4, and footage got mixed in. We're all in the same building, and in some cases, some folks end up working on both.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 5, 2019
Greenberg also explained why NetherRealm decided to use its custom engine instead of adopting the newer Unreal Engine 4 for this latest Mortal Kombat game on current-gen platforms.
The real answer is long and pretty complicated. The short version: evolving our engine let us start working on the game the day IJ2 was completed rather than making the team wait while we rebuilt everything (years and years worth of stuff, much of which we would need) in UE4.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 6, 2019
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Cant tell why people are outraged , UE3 is awesome , Batman Arkham Knight uses UE3 , people think that just because a game has UE4 it will look better than a game using UE3 and that’s just not the case , most games never even scrap the surface of UE 4 because they’re built with console hardware in mind , in fact , UE 4 itself got downgraded because consoles are such a joke , it was meant to include SVOGI natively on first release (basically the lighting tech. 1 step below Ray Tracing) and they removed that because the PS4 was NEVER going to run it.
Rather a game having Arkham Knight graphics than Dead Island 2 graphics.
MK11 is looking great.
You forgot how awfully BAK ran?
The same Arkham Knight that was so poorly made that it was initially pulled from Steam ? Maybe not the best choice to use as an example.
And then it got patched and now runs wonderfully. It’s not even that hardware intensive. It just needs 8 GB ram (as opposed to games still running fine on 4-6 GB back early 2015) and an SSD on PC. But CPU/GPU requirements are quite modest. The game also really wants 2 GB of VRAM, though that’s peanuts in today’s gaming world.
The game uses more than 3gb of VRAM at 1080p ¬¬ still to this day.
And 3 GB VRAM for current gen games is normal
Not 4 years ago.
It still bottlenecks on 3770k @4.5k + 2080. Still I have to agree even today the graphs look amazing.
TBF anything is going to bottleneck with that setup.
“unreal engine 4” games needs a better machine that “unreal engine 3” games. For Example, in my computer i can play mortal kombat XL and it looks great, but marvel vs capcom infinite works on my computer but i had to downgrade some graphic options (and it doesnt look near as good as Mortal kombat XL)
Not everyone has a core 7 and a 1080, and if the difference its not really big. using unreal engine 3 allow lower PC requirements with great graphics, Mortal kombat 11 looks leagues better than marvel vs capcom infinite and the first uses a custom unreal engine 3, and the second uses unreal engine 4.
XD
WELL I THOUGHT THE XBOX ONE X COULD HANDLE ANYTHING!?!? I want my money back.
If you don’t have a core i7 does your opinion matter?
No. It does not.
That’s where you are wrong , using the latest engine doesn’t equal using the latest tech , using the latest engine just means that you can implement the latest tech if you wanted to in the future via patch or dlc , buddy UE4 was supposed to have native support for SVOGI but since absolutely no dev was gonna use it , they canned that , don’t you get it? theres games using UE4 that don’t even use tessellation , and thats a DX11 release date feature (2009 , 10 years ago) , what are you even talking about??? if you want to judge games on what tech they support you should do it on the basis of the tech that they actually support , not the one that their engine in theory could support , that’s nonsense wtf? lol what? I much rather MK11 use a maxed out UE3 than a lazy a*s barelly scrapped UE4 , because I KNOW that a maxed out UE3 LOOKS BETTER AND USES YOUR EXPENSIVE HARDWARE BETTER THAN A SCRAPPY UE4 , the empirical evidence is there , Arkham Knight and Samaritan demo are UE3 maxed out …. now check all the games using UE4 and comeback to me.
I ain’t defending millionaires , im defending common sense pal.
You took the bait so hard lmfao
I felt that at the beginning and thought “who’d bait in DSO Gaming?” and took it , i guess i should’ve followed my gutt rofl.
To be fair, while Arkham Knight looks really good (for 2015) and oozes amazing production values, it still misses a few things. There aren’t quite that many GPU accelerated particles, no particle shadows, no screen space reflections (as far as I remember), no subsurface scattering, just Baked Global Illumination, no Physically Based Rendering. Also, not that big of a deal but UE3 doesn’t natively support contact hardening shadows either. UE4 is better optimized for multicore/multithread rendering and there is native support for DX12, Vulkan and RTX.
UE3 is literally 12 years old if not more. It’s not awesome. It’s beyond outdated. Andit’s even more infuriating to find out MKX was on UE3 considering the ABYSMAL performance for a year after launch.
If you need perspective, BioShock 1, 2, and 3 were UE3. And Red Orchestra 2.
Also, you’ve literally never seen Dead Island 2, nor has anyone else on this site, but keep saying stupid things.
Does it matter? A lot of fighting fans praise the graphics anyway. Surprised to see they able to achieve a realistic looking face if it really uses modified UE 3 engine.
Whats the problem with old engines again? Does it look good? Yes? Does it play good? YESSS? You care WHY???
Custom UE3… Hmmm Oh! Batman: AK, fck up PC port, all of Batman games had problems so….
MKX also custom UE3… bad performance, bad network module, and another suprise cutscenes, are in 30fps, game runs on consoles also in max 30fps lol!
To be fair all PC Batman ports were superior to the console equivalents. Higher rez textures, AO, higher rez shadows, Physx AND DX11 tech. Hell, Arkham City implemented DX11 features before UE3 even implemented DX11 support/features in the SDK.
It was always silly EPIC took about 3 years before adding DX11 support themselves.
Um that makes no sense whatsoever. Why would the mobile version be on the new engine and the real version would be on the same version as the last 2 games.
Also, BS. It wouldn’t take that long to update their version of UE4. That’s literally how UE4 is designed, it was meant to be as easy and friendly as possible. Furthermore there’s no way MKX was on 3, so, BS.
Fourth do they even understand how old UE3 is? UE3 is literally over 10 years old. There’s no excuse for how badly MKX ran if that’s the case.
“Furthermore there’s no way MKX was on 3”
MK9. MKX, MK11, Injustice and Injustice 2 all run under UE3, just like Guilty Gear Xrd Sign and Xrd Revelator
Unreal Engine 3 doesn’t support mobile devices, Hence why they used Unreal Engine 4 for the mobile version.
I get that part. The crying about “the workload” is nonsense though. No one asked for MK11 only 3 years after MKX especially when MKX was such a flaming pile of garbage.
ahhh this is why, b/c they’re bringing to switch. #MillenialKombat11
UE3 does not support the Switch, hence, they are modifying the engine to run on Switch
Infinity Blade (iOS) used UE3 just like Dungeon Defenders (Android) so the engine support mobile
Epic Games modified their own Unreal Engine 3 to work on IOS, Third party mobile support didn’t exist until Unreal Engine 4.
As for Dungeon Defenders, Trendy Entertainment got a quite a bit of help from engineers at Epic Games.
Wow! This is another level BS.
UE3 has so many bugs and online problem… this is bad… really really bad…
All Call of Duty games use a 20 year old custom Quake III Engine (id Tech 3). All Bethesda Game Studios games are using the same engine from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion from 2006.
Morrowind uses some other engine called NetImmerse, though GameBryo is most likely the rebranding of that engine. So yeah you could be right.
and WoW uses the Warcraft 3 engine right? I don’t see a problem with old engines if they look good, run great and are mostly bug free. Years of updates should mean stable engines… (well in most cases.. cough cough Bethesda..)
That’s mostly true.
Nice Edit.
Oh for the love of god, why do you think running with a modified engine is a good idea?, just look at Batman and Dishonored for recent examples.
My guess is, they are gonna keep playing with ue3 until they port their specialized tools modules to ue4 and finding the ropes.
The mobile release is a precursor of that change.
At least that’s what I think.
I believe another reason could’ve aided in this decision, royalties. Epic takes 5% of gross revenue for the game if using UE4. Before UE4 they took a flat rate(the amount was also negotiable I believe) for a license to use their software.
Between that and having spent plenty of time developing their own upgrades to UE3 I feel it makes a bit of sense to go this route as a business decision. They’d be avoiding that royalty for their main source of income(Consoles, PC).
I’m a MK fan, I gladly pre-ordered MKX only to get crapped on, have always been a fan and bought MK9 immediately after the first time someone showed it to me.
And I have to say this looks like trash. The textures are so outdated, the animations are rigid and silly, the movesets for the people I’ve seen like Cassie are even worse than before, just come on NRS.
Kotal’s sword literally looks like plastic. It looks like it came from one of the video game action figures I have.