Kotaku just ran an article about some guy figuring out how to make those unplayable fighters that are in the game into playable ones. They would be the ones who only showed up and fought you during the story mode like Baraka, Rain, and Sindel. It basically involves swapping out an existing fighter with the unplayable ones so the game thinks you're playing as one of the included fighters when you're really not like in the video below where Shinnok was (understandably) swapped out for Rain.

Hahaha, that's fuckin great. Awesome.

Yeah, I have absolutely no idea why they chose to make those character unplayable. It smacks of DLC in waiting to me.

@dudeglove: He unlocks when you play Mortal Kombat X after a 12 hour marathon viewing of MacGruber mixed with drinking

I assume right now, the characters like Rain and Baraka are literally just their MK9 moveset, without the 3 variant system introduced in MKX?

But yeah, the whole thing smacks of "those characters are probably going to get full playable versions with 3 variations and be released as the second wave of DLC, unless MKX completely tanked in the first week."

I have to assume those characters had to be dlc. You don't just have those kind of assets laying around without the intent to making some money on them later on. Pretty dope though for MK X players on PC.

@panelhopper said:

They seem to control like their MK9 counterparts, if they were made full characters then they would've had to have 3 variations each, which I assume would have been a lot more work. Also probably additional costumes, brutalaties and fatalaties (I don't think they have any).

I would have also been fine with them being stripped down compared to the rest of the cast, so long as they were playable. But I imagine it just doesn't look good to have a few lesser chars on the roster.

Oh and also they could polish them up for DLC later, if they were so inclined.

These characters were all in the previous game, so in this case I'd probably say that, yes, they did have those kind of assets just laying around.

It'd be pretty disappointing if there was a second wave of DLC and all it did was bring back/flesh out the MK9 characters that appear in the story. Hopefully they won't just do that... or if they do, hopefully they price it accordingly.

This is terrific. Good on whoever figured this out. I'd assumed these kharacters would be tied to Krypt Unlocks, but them not being playable at all is just weird to me when all is said and done.

They've clearly done some work on the models and the effects of their spells, which leads me to believe that they intend to use them for something more than just background dressing for the story mode. There's just the one variation for each one as is, belittling the term variation, but it's plenty of groundwork done and it'll hopefully expedite the process of adding them as full kharacters into the game proper. I do think it'd be really cool if there was a kharacter pack at a reduced cost. It'd create goodwill among the folks who are displeased with their DLC methodology and it'd make sense given the work done on said kharacters already.

I can't stop saying "kharacters", send help.

Those characters would need a lot more work done to make them on par with the fully-developed cast.

Yep.

I feel people are being weirdly antagonistic about this.

To be fair, there is some weird markety/dlc garbage in MKX but this does not seem to be it. Prices will tell more.

Baraka, Sindel, and Rain are all copies of their MK9 counterparts and most of their moves don't even work as they did in MK9 (Rain's ball for instance isn't controllable). They don't have X-Rays, Fatalities, Brutalities, and most of them don't even have links.

And then there's Tanya who has Kitana's stance (you can even see where she is supposed to be holding fans) and a lot of Kitana's normals.

These characters aren't complete enough to even be called playable. This is exactly what happened in MK9 when modders found out how to lay as Goro, Kintaro, and Shao Khan and discovered that while you can use them the majority of their moves simply did not work right or in most cases were completely broken.

These characters are good enough for the AI to use against you and pose a challenge but people need to pump the breaks.

And it's also worth nothing that Injustice, MK9, and even the older MK games like Deception all had fully modeled characters with limited movesets that were in no way playable without modding tools. Hell, Tremor who is ironically DLC in MKX was in the vita version of MK9 but are largely a copy/paste job of the existing Ninjas with a couple of unique moves.

After recently being sparked to play MK, I booted up MK Komplete on PC. While the exclusion of characters already the game isn't as apparent with MK 9, there was characters that you could mod into the game. Kintaro, Goro, and Shao Kahn.

I get they need to make money, but it just feels dirty that there are regular ass characters in MK X that are locked away. It will be a bitter pill to swallow for either Netherrealm/WB if nobody buys them as DLC, and the fan base that has to buy more in order to play these characters. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not included in the season pass.

@majortoms:

People are acting like these are fully locked away characters hidden in the game. They are NPCs rendered that are only half complete at best and fit only to pose a (minimal) challenge in the storymode.