When the great Mortal Kombat X released on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC in April, the promised last-gen entries were curiously missing. Warner Bros. said they’d follow at a later time, so we twiddled our thumbs and waited.
But the wait is over now, and it’s not good news: the publisher has cancelled the last-gen entries after deciding they wouldn’t meet the series’ (more recent) quality standards. This decision was reached months after the game hit other platforms, and years after Mortal Kombat X began overall production.
“Please know our teams worked diligently to meet the quality standards set by the current-gen versions of the game,” reads a statement on the official forums. “We were not able to get the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions to the quality expected of a Mortal Kombat game and are very sorry for not being able to deliver the products as originally planned.”
So what happened? NetherRealm passed off development of the last-gen versions to High Voltage Software, and it doesn’t sound like they were able to bring the game to life on older hardware. We shouldn’t be that surprised: Warner Bros. never released a single image from the last-gen games, and the publisher also canned Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Mad Max this year.
If the ports weren’t turning out well, then it’s for the best: Warner Bros. released shoddy last-gen versions of Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor last fall, and this summer’s PC port of Batman: Arkham Knight was (and is still) an embarrassing mess. Better to bail out than to release a bad game attached to a big brand, especially after that string of misfires.
Still, that’s probably not much consolation to last-gen series fans that waited the last few months on a promise.
Source: Warner Bros.
