For decades now, being able to pull off a complex set of quick button presses to activate a gruesome fatality has been a point of pride for Mortal Kombat players. Now, the latest game in the series, Mortal Kombat X, will let you set off a bloody kill animation with only a couple of button presses... for a price.
As Ars' Sam Machkovech noticed last night, the Xbox Live and PSN stores both offer packs of "easy fatalities" as downloadable content for the game, which launched today. The consumable items let players pull off the bloody finishing move by simply holding down a shoulder button and pushing a face button, rather than entering an entire series of buttons and directions in a specific order. Players can buy a pack of five easy fatalities for $0.99, or 30 for $4.99 (the DLC packs don't appear to be available for the PC version through Steam, as of this writing).
Mortal Kombat X players start with three free "easy fatality" tokens, though their function is hidden in a pause menu, and they never seem to be fully explained. Once those are gone, players can earn more of these tokens as random rewards by spending in-game "koins" in the krypt. There is no way to earn the simplified moves reliably without opening your wallet, though.
This new gameplay "innovation" for the Mortal Kombat series has got us brainstorming about what other difficult tests of skill we might be able to skip in the future, thanks to DLC. It sure would be nice to get an instant headshot in Battlefield without having to go to the trouble of precise aiming or to automatically dodge without the need for a well-timed button press in Bloodborne. If this kind of DLC catches on, maybe we'll be able to perform these moves through the magic of the free market, rather than the acquisition of specific skills.
We'll have a full review of Mortal Kombat X in the coming days.
Sam Machkovech contributed to this report
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