Earlier today,
@MK_XTRA on Twitter discovered more evidence of the
Mortal Kombat: HD Kollection that we confirmed last summer. The resume of a freelance 3D Artist lists the game as a project that he did props and environment art for.
March 2009 - Present
Self-Employed | Freelance 3D Artist
Remote contract work for Liquid Development, Streamline Studios, and numerous independent game developers. Major projects includes prop and environment art for Doom 4, Mortal Kombat HD Arcade Kollection and Firefall. In addition, architectural visualisation projects for GSA Architects and Virteer.
Later on in his resume he lists the title information directly, which only lists the
PlayStation 3 as the platform the game is coming out on. We still hope that Warner Bros. is looking to make this a
timed exclusive and later release it for
Xbox 360 owners as well.
Title: Mortal Kombat HD Arcade Kollection
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Platform: Playstation 3
One of the videos on his demo video showcases his 3D environment work, which is very realistic looking. It's likely they are re-creating many of the games' stages for this HD remix, as much of the older stage artwork would need to be recreated for the larger HD resolutions.
Mortal Kombat 3 was the first game where they started modeling the stage environments in 3D. That means the backgrounds and some objects for the older games would have be re-created in 3D where old usable 3D models no longer existed. This process was recently done to varying degrees of success by
EA Mobile in their
iPhone port of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 where some stages look very close to the originals and others look drastically different.
Since the
November 2010 date came and went it was discovered that both
Blockbuster and
FYE both have a
early March 2011 release dates listed. That would be a good time to release it if it does still include a playable
Mortal Kombat (2011) demo as the
leaked cover art previously revealed. But some international retailers are listing the game for
June 2011 release date. So time will tell on this, as development of games are no easy task, and we'd rather them make it right instead of rushing it. We are sure Warner Bros will announce it once they are ready.
Thanks to
KornKombat for bringing this news bit to our attention. And thanks to
fraysol,
ShawnBronald and
Morbyr for the newer rumored release dates.
Update 1/12: With no surprise the job listings have been removed from the artist's website. At his request we also have removed links to his name and website due to being contacted by far too many MK fans begging for information. So we highly request fans don't try reach out to him as he'd be unable to mention the project officially due to any
work related NDA he would have signed.
This is a screenshot of MK2 for the Arcade which runs at a screen resolution of 399x253 which is what arcades call <b>STANDARD RESOLUTION</b>. So when MK2 runs on the PS3 today, it's image is upscaled by a factor of 4.27 to make it become 1080p. It looks blurry and very crappy when it's done, if you've played this version you'd understand that it's not ideal to upscale the game in such a way to reach maximum visual fidelity.
In my experience it's much better to re-create artwork at a higher resolution instead of just upscaling the existing graphics, which is what they are doing for MK HD from what I can tell with new actors and artists re-creating the environments. Which is what my post was trying to say.
Should I have said: "as much of the older artwork was likely not scalable to HD resolutions"?
Probably not as it wasn't super clear, so I changed it to "as much of the older stage artwork would need to be recreated for the larger HD resolutions"
Either way it didn't call for your "holier than thou" attitude.
And because MK uses digitized actors, not sprites like other 2D fighters they must go back and recapture every single frame of animation for all characters with HD cameras. Trust me it is going to look amazing!
Just look at the size of the original Ryu sprite on the far left. Imagine that being a MK character now look at the HD Remaster of Ryu. The difference in size is immense!!
The Ryu just to the left of the HD sprite is what you are playing with if you own MK II or UMK 3 on PS3 or 360 , an up-res'd sprite. Again, as you can see the jump in quality will be quite significant.
That's what fighting games are made for...
spoke to THE ARTIST (about MK HD)... please remove any
links to his website or any mention of him working on ....
thnx!
MK_XTRA
(Shujinko is my TRMK.org account)
