well i may be apt to agree with you marathon except they've made several big mistakes in the past imo...first of all, when they went from arcade release to straight to console releases, they did it without much a fuss....which, besides it being one of the worse mk games, mk:da didn't fare so well. then if that wasn't bad enough they introduced kreate-a-fatality, oh wait i'm skipping ahead. first they introduced little "cutesy" games to play, which yea it may have been cool once and awhile beating someone on chess kombat, but those games got old real quick and there are other ways to play these games, ie battle chess. then came kreate-a-fatality, and they took out the uniqueness of each character having their own distinct finishers...now it's up in the air as to whether this game will even have fatalities or not. the only person who knows why tobias left when he did is him and midway, and since i don't know him so i'm not going to say why he left, however i do have to say that if he were around now he'd probably be getting as much of the flack that boon's going to be getting.