t this year's Midway Gamers' Day 2005, Billy Berghammer and Andrew Reiner tracked down Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks Creative Director Ed Boon and Producer Shaun Himmerick to grill them on their upcoming game.  And apparently from what they said, there are plenty of surprises ahead for all you Mortal Kombat fans out there, with new characters, outrageous moves, and more secrets than you could even begin to comprehend.

Game Informer: First off, will I be able to fire up Shaolin Monks and go online and play cooperatively with someone else?

Ed Boon: No, so far there isn’t a plan for this game to go online yet, but for future games it may be a consideration. 

Shaun Himmerick: We looked at online and the things that we would have to cut back on, and what we found were some things that we didn’t really want to do gameplay wise.  And, it would have been too expensive.  We really want to maximize gameplay and that’s the decision that we ended up making: no online. 

GI: Is there anything that you lose or gain by playing cooperatively as opposed to single player?

EB: Actually, I think that the cooperative mode has some opportunities that the single player mode doesn’t have.  There may be some rooms or areas that you can only gain access to if you’re playing cooperatively that aren’t available if you’re playing through by yourself.  So, it’s actually an advantage to play with someone else.

SH: We wanted to the experience to be more than just having two people playing through the single player game at the same time.  There are two player combos, two player Fatalities, and a lot of other two player elements.  There are even two player exclusive bosses that you can only fight when you’re playing with someone else.  We really tried to make it more than just having two players playing at the same time.

GI: When we look at Shaolin Monks, one of the first comparisons that comes to mind is Double Dragon.  Do you agree with this perception and is this sort of the case?

EB: When I think of Double Dragon, I think of two guys progressing down a street and beating up a bunch of guys and doing really cool moves.  In that respect it’s kind of the same, while this game obviously goes way further; movement is vertical, you can climb walls, there’s aerial combat, and there’s cooperative combat.  When compared to games that could be classified as “beat ‘em ups,” it could roughly be put in the same category.  But, I like to think that Shaolin Monks is way more elaborate in terms of a combat system than Double Dragon was. 

SH: I agree.  With the interactive backgrounds, the combat system, the MK-style combos and branching moves, we like to think of it being much more upgraded than Double Dragon.

GI: You guys are using the left analog stick to change your character’s direction in the game.  Could you elaborate a bit more on how this systems works in the game overall?

SH: The left analog stick controls your player, while the right analog stick controls the camera that allows you to pan the view around.  We have three camera modes in the game, including one that’s really close and sort of the mimics the traditional Mortal Kombat side view.  There’s also a medium distance view, which we think is the best choice, as well as a panoramic camera.  You can’t pan the panoramic camera viewpoint, but it pretty much lets you see the entire area around you. 

EB: One of the things about the combat system that I draw parallels to is Smash TV, where one stick is being used to control your direction and the other stick, or in this case the four buttons, are being used to fire and tell your character what to do while moving.  In Shaolin Monks, you sort of use the sticks in tandem, and it becomes very intuitive after awhile. 

GI: When you’re playing cooperatively, when happens one player moves further away from the other player, or falls off a ledge or dies?

SH: Well we have two really cool features for this.  Say you’re platforming up an area and one person falls.  We don’t want to penalize both players and really want to keep the game moving forward.  So what we do is have that fallen player teleport back up to where they were.  They’ll get a small health penalty, but you won’t have to back up and redo everything.  We loved it in focus tests, watching players player cooperatively and when one of them fell, seeing the other player get frustrated but then instantly happy seeing that their partner didn’t die. 

GI: Did you pick the Mortal Kombat 2 story because that’s what the fans were asking for?

EB:  No.  But you know what, Paradox had already started developing the game and when they came to pitch it to us, they mocked up Raiden as the character doing all the moves.  When we looked at the game we came up with suggestions, like having two players at the same time, make it Liu Kang and Kung Lao, call it Shaolin Monks, and other things like that.  And once it was Liu Kang and Kung Lao as the main characters, it sort of set it.  They were both in MK 2 and a million ideas sort of spawned from that.  Then all of a sudden we had this whole nostalgia of wanting to bring all the MK 2 characters into the mix, but at the same time providing a much more elaborate story.  So, it started off as Raiden and we gave them the sort of direction of Shaolin Monks and Liu Kang and Kung Lao. 

GI: How many playable characters have you settled on so far?

SH: More than two!  There isn’t a final number yet.  We could fit in a ton of playable characters if we were willing to sacrifice differentiation.  If one character fights the exact same way as all the others, heck, we could have everyone be playable.  But, we don’t want to do that.  We really want to make each character feel and play differently.  Right now Liu Kang and Kung Lao feel and play completely different from each other.  So there may be as few as three and the most there would probably be is six. 

GI: Would those remaining characters be unlockable?

EB: Yes, you’d start off with only Liu Kang and Kung Lao, but would eventually unlock more playable characters. 

GI: How will this change gameplay?  Will the extra characters have their own unique combos and moves?

SH: They’d each have their own super moves, but they'd still have “their” moves.  The co-op moves would probably be the same combos to prevent everything from breaking, so to speak. 

GI: In regards to these secret characters, such as with someone’s unique and unlockable Fatality sequences, will these moves translate over to the new characters as well? 

EB: Every move like that will be characters specific. 

SH: Characters have their own exclusive Fatality moves, so if you see Liu Kang use a particular move and then try to do the same thing with Lung Lao, it won’t work. 

GI: Will the game support widescreen?

SH: Yes!  Widesceeen is the definitive way to play this game.  We just got it working about a month ago and it is so much better.  You can see 20 percent more of what’s going on around you.

GI: How about progressive scan?

SH: Yes, for both.  It’s going to be awesome in widescreen.  When we ship this game I am going to buy a great big widescreen television just for it. 

GI: We broke the first news on Shaolin Monks, but so far, how is the development cycle progressing?  We got to see a lot of illustrations of boss battles and plans for other characters, but what sort of plans do you have for that element now? How are you going to make each boss battle different?

SH: Believe it or not, content wise, the team has reached their limit in what they’ve put in the game.  So basically we have from now until the game ships to add a ton of stuff that’s related to storyline and camera and other things.  We have a tremendous amount of time now to just polish every single piece of the game.  All the boss fights, in particular, will get a lot of this sort of attention. 

EB: One of the things that we’re balancing right now is being able to have all sorts of gamers be able to pick up the gameplay.  We’re dealing with queues and flashes in certain areas to get people in tune with what they need to do at certain points in the game.  Once we can communicate these nuances, the game is so much more fun because you realize what you need to do.  Some people still pick up the game and can instantly figure out what to do, and those are the people that we need to say that you need to do more than simply mash on the buttons. 

GI: You talked earlier tonight about Fatalities as well as the possibility of having Brutalities.  Do you think you’ll go with those and include them in the game?

SH: Yeah.  They’re in there and functional and it’s just that we need to get the screen effects, figure out what you do each time, and we’re totally going for more polish overall for the feature.  It’s in and working, but just rough so far. 

EB: A lot of the approach to this game was figuring out what was cool about Mortal Kombat games and that was the special moves.  The same approach was taken to Fatalities, but it’s neat to add varying degrees of brutality to the moves and that’s where this idea of the Brutality comes in.  There are going to be some moves in the game that will absolutely crack you up.  We’re not going to have anything like Friendships or the like in the game, but it’s going to really be funny, especially if you’ve seen some of the more bizarre moves from the earlier games.

GI: You mentioned this in the press conference and it absolutely floored us.  You’re going to have a secret in every room in the game?

SH: Yes, that’s right.  I love getting the question of how long the game will take to beat, since if you just play through it, it will be around 12 hours.  But, if you play through it and try to find every secret, that number will go up to around 30 hours. 

GI: Do you know yet how many total secrets are going to be in the game?

EB: The secrets are mainly found within the background of each room, it’s not like the big graveyard in Deception.  I’m still surprised by the obscurity of the some of the secrets that are in places that I didn’t even know about.  You may run into a room and then run up a wall and find some tiny area where you can break through the wall and find something.  It’s ridiculous. 

SH: We don’t have a total number set yet because we don’t want to guarantee a number.  I can say that there will be over 100 and it won’t be like the Crypt in Deception.  We didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t right or well.  I can guarantee at least 100 unlockables, because there’s at least that many rooms.  There are also going to be secrets that you can get to right away until you have a certain power, too. 

GI: If there are going to be such big differences between single and co-op play, are you going to have two different game saves for each game type?

SH: The current plan now is that you start off the game with either one or two players. 

GI: Why the choice not to include that kind of functionality? Let’s say a friend of mine comes over and you’re playing through the game and want him to join you. 

SH: That’s a good question.  At this point I don’t think that we’ve considered that kind of scenario.  The main technical hurdle for that is that since you’re already playing through the game and you’re gaining co-op experience and special moves, if you went the other route and had someone join in on a single player game that character would be coming in bare bones.  He might not have a certain skill that you may need to progress.  If we did, we’d have to just give you a bunch of skills and that player wouldn’t have gone through the tutorial and learned how to pull off some essential moves. 

GI: Have you ever gone online in Deception disguised and played against people?

SH: Oh totally and I’ve gotten my butt kicked.  There are some guys who are just ridiculously good. 

GI: Do you use voice chat?

SH: Well, I’ll usually have it on, but I won’t say much.  If someone is being a jerk I may say something. 

GI: What have you learned from that process, since in terms of focus testing, it’s an interesting opportunity to see how the game is being played and received?

EB: The biggest thing to me is that we need to be more elaborate in our online community.  I definitely want to have things like tournaments.  I think it would be so cool to be in the middle of that, as well as have a spectator mode that lets you watch fights.  And, it would be cool if we had some sort of prizes to win if you made it through tournaments.

GI: Have you ever thought about having things like prizes, say a belt, as an added cosmetic feature for your character?

EB: We’d love to have that.  It would be neat to have a belt or cape, or anything really, to have for your characters.  It would be neat to run into someone online and see that have a certain item and learn from them what they had to do in order to get it.

GI: What did you think of Raiden in Unreal Championship?

EB: You know, that’s like the tenth time someone has asked us about that, but we’ve done lots of things like that in the past.  Slugfest had a whole team of guys and Psi-Ops had Scorpion.  I guess a lot of people think that it’s really cool, but it’s still something that we’ve done before.