Mortal Kombat Able To Be Patched On The Fly
Aris ON Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 9:52AM 
Though I have no idea how this is possible, Ed Boon has claimed that NRS will be able to patch Mortal Kombat with balance changes on the fly. As far as I know, all patches must go through a rigorous QA process for both PSN and XBL. I don't know how they are going to bypass that but here is an exerpt from an interview.
“In Mortal Kombat we have a system where we can make adjustments to the special moves and balance things out even after the game has been released,”
“If an infinite were to come out, or a character is too powerful, we can make adjustments and address those things immediately.”
“It’s something that’s built into our system,” he said. “We can do it without having players have to download a patch. That’s something we’re very excited about. We can monitor what things players may have an issue with and then correct them as needed”
“That’s the new technology we developed for this game. We’ve seen other fighting games, including our own, have characters we wish were more balanced, more powerful or weaker. So we devised a system that lets us modify the rules of the game, dynamically.”
“You could think of it as a mini-update, but it’s done in the background.”
Reader Comments (9)
this is what I like!
GJ
I just hope they give fair warning that there was a patch. Though, it would be sorta funny to see a player get into top 16 and almost sure to win. Next tournament day a mini patch is downloaded and the player loses because his combo or something no longer works.
Ok, all the things that 9thpixel said + I don't believe a shit of what Boon says. They claimed the online was very very very lag-free and it is anything but! They said it was a new technology and the game was developed with online play in mind and bla bla bla nad fuckin bla... online is shit!
I have no archades in this shitty country I live in and nobody of my friends play videogames. (I'm 32)
So I'm fucked.
But the game itself (offline) is amazing! I just love it. The day I got it I plkayed for 6 hours straight because it was so great!
As I understand it (although I'm no authority on the matter), each title has a little storage area on xbl/psn's servers which small data files can be stored and the client (read: your game instance) checks against it when you start up the game. I presume they have the various moves' properties detailed in this data, so rather than patching code to alter the game, they update some config files and each client automatically updates when they boot up.
Therefore they don't need to go through the patch/recertification process each time, because it's a standard mechanism for storing and retrieving data of this type.
Uncharted 2 had something similar where they could change certain things in the multiplayer without a download.
What @fluxcore says makes sense. I don't think a recertification process would be necessary, that would be bullshit and make the configuration nearly pointless. I don't know about the first sentence of your post, but I'll take your word for it.
I am on the fence about patches. While I hate to see a broken game go unfixed, it could change the whole game for better or for worse.
EA does a similar thing with their NHL games. They are able to adjust variables on the fly without having to patch the game to make cheap techniques less effective.
Here's something to balance....has any checked out Sektor's bbd, way faster than anyone else's bbd. Go to practice and see for yourself