Mortal Kombat reboot underway!

Wow, it's certainly been a slow couple of days as far as news is concerned. Luckily, Ed Boon is spicing things up by throwing out some vague details concerning the next Mortal Kombat. Game Informer got some time to talk to the man and here's a bit of what he had to say:

GI: How far into development is it?
Boon: The main thing we’re doing right now is the core technology. We’re using the Unreal 3 engine, and we’re getting our base, “How do display a character, normal-mapping, bump-mapping, shadows” all the things that are expected of the game. I have a bunch of ideas on paper in terms of things that I’d like to theoretically try, but it’s not like it’s in a playable state yet. — We’re doing something with the next game that’s unbelievably unexpected, and there’s going to be an announcement. I totally was told, “You cannot talk about this thing.” I think it’s going to be rolled out.

GI: How has the experience been with the next-gen, and what are some of the nuances that you’re finding with the Xbox 360 and PS3?

Boon: Our goal, graphically, with this game is to be as gritty and—I don’t like to use the word “dirty,” because I don’t want to imply not-cool graphics—but a very dark, serious Mortal Kombat. Not vibrant, saturated colors, but more of a really down and dirty Mortal Kombat game. To me, when I saw Gears of War, I was like, “Holy s___! That’s the look that we’ve been talking about.” Visually, that’s what we want to do. Gameplay-wise, I kind of attribute it to what we did with Deadly Alliance, where everything is thrown out. We’re not going to have three fighting styles, we’re not going to have the same punches and kicks and the same kind of control scheme. Everything is getting trashed. We’re reinventing everything from the ground up. We really think that’s needed—you know, we’re on Mortal Kombat 8, in a sense—to kind of wipe the slate clean every once in a while, and I kind of feel that now is the time. Our visual presentation and our game presentation and our thing that you’ll hear about very soon are all going to be new to this game. It’s going to be nothing like you’ve ever seen before.

Sounds like a complete reboot of the franchise. This feels a little reminiscent of MK4. I could compare Armageddon to Trilogy in that both games had nearly every single character spanning MK history. Each game was also the last following the "current" Mortal Kombat format before Midway moved on to try something new.

This is exciting. While I love Johnny Cage and Sub-Zero to no end, I think it's high time Midway moved on to some new IP. If we're lucky, more franchises will take a Final Fantasy-ish approach, with each new game being unrelated to the ones before it.

Hit the link above for the full interview.