- Hi, I'm Dominic Cianciolo.I'm the story and voiceover of the director for NetherRealm Studios and I'm here today to answer some unsolved mysteries about the mortal Kombat universe. First up Guillerme R asked why didn't Kronika restore Shinnok. So Kronika did not restore Shinnok because it was beyond her power do so, when Raiden decapitated Shinnok at the end of Mortal Kombat X, that act itself was irreversible. And it was that act that tipped the balance between good and evil in the mortal kombat universe, irrevocably towards good. - God has upset the balance of his strength. - And because Chronicle no longer could achieve her desired balance of good and evil between the realms and moral kombat universe. That's why she decided to restart time and take everybody back to the beginning of reboot desk. Keon H asks are Raiden Shao Kahn, and Argus the same race of immortals? And as a followup also asks, what does it mean for Raiden and Fujin to be Demigods? Well, at this point in mortal Kombat, Shao, Kahn Raiden and Argus are not the same types of beings. Shao Kahn they're extremely powerful is neither a God. More in a more Raiden and August are more similar having divine origin. They're both being protectors that respect of realms. These are the term Demigod for Raiden and Fujin. It's simply to note them as lesser gods and the elder gods. Uh, we found that people were getting confused as to sort of what layer they were on. And so we adopted that term in MK 11 to try to separate it and make it a little clear where they were. Uh, this is not to indicate that they're any less divine than the elder gods themselves. Dragos M.S asks, who does Nitara answer to? Is there a high ranking authority among the vampires? Vampires elders? and just what exactly is Nitara? Alright, so Nitara, we haven't seen in awhile hails from the realm of awareness, which is where her race of vampires are from. And controllers of internist is ruled by a coven, which includes the head of the realms, most ancient 12 families and the tower reports directly to that cover. So Tahseen H asks if Shao Kahn is a God and former protector Outworld like in the original timeline. Well, first for those that aren't aware, the original timeline we're talking about are all the games prior to the mortal Kombat reboot in 2011, quickly known as MK 9 among certain folks. So that's when we began our narrative and started things up again. So starting in that mortal Kombat Shao Kahn is a little bit different. Shao Kahn is mortal. There was life span is so long. That's the first round we're seeking feel like he is, he has great strength. He can build incredible magic, but he would not be considered a God because he's not a divine origin who created the soul stones that are deep inside the Netherrealm? The soul stones that are in NetherRealm was first created by the sorcerer that toiled for the elder gods Back in the most ancient times, the sorcerers were tasked with building a network of portals. Where we connect all the realms together, but working in the Netherrealms, sat their powers. And as a result, they needed to build the soul stones to restore their energy as they worked in Netherrealm - Fatality! - So the Ars Technica editors were asking, you know, looking back on the series, which are my favorite Fatalities, Babalities, friendships, and animality? So my favorite fatality is Johnny's deadly uppercut from a more common, deadly upper - Cut Reset - Deadly Uppercut take two. - Action cut. - Who hired this guy.. - I love the amount of storytelling that Shannon Mira and our fatalities team jam. It is such a small amount of time.It was gross. It was funny, and it was just totally in character for Johnny cage and another one from Tahseen H, Tahseen asks, where are the other elemental Gods? So far we've only seen Raiden and Fujin so where do they go? Are they dead? Or they're in the Temple of the Elements, as Fujin says in one of his intros. So as Fujin said, the wise Demigods, that he is the other element of God's continued to guard the temple of the elements. It's there, that they're keeping watch over various sacred items that need to be kept away from both mortals and as well as other evildoers in the moral kombat universe. Now, MarkT_D_W asks ,I need to ask the single most important hotly debated unanswered question in the history of the entire mortal combat series. And that is what the hell happened in Fiji with Jackie Briggs? This is something that's referenced in a few of our intro dialogues, and it's very clear that, uh, Jackie had a very bad experience with Fiji, a humorous one, but a bad one But I have to say much of what happened on Fujin remains classified. What little we know has been pieced together from materials that have brought to light versus freedom of information act, request it's an on the ground eyewitness testimony. - So what the heck happened in Fiji? - God, can we not do this? - What we do know is that the U.S government has a special operation to infiltrate a meeting, being held by an international terrorist group should have been simple, but thanks to a combination of sketching, Intel pesty, innocent bystanders in a particularly irate, a Guana, the whole mission went South. - You see builds about the Fiji mission. - Heard all about the umbrella drinks. - I'm going to kill him. - Animality. - My favorite Animality has to be Katana's rabbit Animality hands down. I mean, how can animality that references money Python all Holy grail not be your favorite. I mean, to me that just wins. - Can'tBanTheJan asks, So if Raiden and Liu Kans coexisting together disturb Kronika's desired balance, why does she always restart time with both of them existing and being allies? Okay Kronika's his ultimate goal has been to create a timeline where good and evil are in perfect balance. She hasn't achieved that goal yet. And some the scales have tipped too far towards good and others they've tipped too far. It's toward evil in each case when the scales tip too far in one direction, the other Kronika has rebooted the timeline and started over. Now Raidens and Lui Kans coexistence does not by itself, irrevocably tip the scale towards good. In fact, Kronika Caesar alliances that he means for good to strongly balanced either and with each iteration of the timeline, she's always trying to strike a better balance. It's only in those timelines were Raiden and Lie Kan had caused things to go too far excited, good that they become a problem. And she's still trying to just tweak it to get it exactly where she wants to be. Tahseen asks did the Titans birth the other Elder Gods, similar to how Kronika birth Cetrion and the fallen elder god Shinnok? So of the elder gods only Shinnok can set around were born of Kronika and they're the only two elder gods that were born at the Titans. Uh, Kronika births Shinnok and Cetrion, and set around it so she could have an inside man and an inside woman in place, as she was trying to achieve our mission of balancing good and evil between the realms. Other than Kronika, the other Titans really have not involved himself directly in the affairs of the realms. FuryofFrog asks, how many Kahns have there been? The exact number of outward Kahns unfortunately has been lost to the pages of history, because outer world Kahns usually forced their predecessors out rather than peaceably succeed them. And therefore the tendency has been to bury the history of prior regimes rather than celebrated. As a result, much of our knowledge of how world history has actually been lost. So Dragos M.S also asks how did Chaosrealm come to be? Well before there were any realms at the beginning of existence, there was only the elder gods and the one being the one being fed off the elder gods and would have consumed them at the elder gods, had not fought back. The elder gods defeated the one being and split the one being into pieces. Those pieces became the realms, all the rounds, including Chaosrealm. TavishDeGroot1 asks, did frost kill her mother intentionally or accidentally? Her dialogue can be taken both ways. It's pretty clear that it was intentional. Frost had a really lousy home life and a lot of beasts. - Babality - My favorite Babality is Kainos Babality from mortal kombat nine. I love the fact that his facial cybernetic implant is too heavy for baby canine and it causes them to fall over. I mean, short of watching him list to one side and then just fall over, cracks me up every time. Ars Technica also asks which MK character has the happiest home life? Well, as we established a bit earlier frost, certainly, but if we're defining happiest home life, as in the traditional sense, as someplace that's peaceful and pleasant and a place of refuge, I'd have to go with Luke hat. I mean his life among the shell and is a great source of personal strength for him. But if we're defining happy, home is one that simply gives the character pleasure. I'd probably have to go with Kaino. I mean, he revels in the crazy to Bosch right there. - I'm doing this one for fun. - It's a life that most rational trained people reject, but it's certainly makes him happy. And another question from FuryofFrog when regular humans die, do they go to the NetherRealm or is that only for kombatants? So the NetherRealm and the mortal Kombat universe is the place where any creature who dies with an evil soul will go uh, it doesn't matter whether they're a combatant or just a regular Joe living somewhere, if you're evil, or if your soul is tainted with evil, when you die, you're going to wind up in Netherrealm. You know, what is the origin of toasty? - Toasty,toasty - This happened well before I got to the studio, but here's basically how it went down. Ed Boon and Dan Forden used to play a lot of high impact and super high impact football games. They both worked on together while working on MK1. As the players break the huddle and approach the line. There's a brief opportunity to get in with a brag or a talk foreplay starts something, the lines of like, I'm going to bust you up or you're toast. Well, your toast turned into, I predict toes or something like that. And somehow then it became, I predicted toasty with an operatic false setup, warmer. - Toasty - George Petro, another game designer we're working with commented that they should put it as some kind of installations. I joke and little combat didn't think anybody was taking this seriously until Ed one day suggested that'd be cool that if I'm 1% of all uppercuts an image of Dan's face with slide on it, the screen and say toasty. - Oh, toasty - Dan agreed, and the rest is history. - Toasty. - Friendship! - My favorite friendships, I really wanted to split this up between old school and new school because things changed so much in terms of how we can present them and the amount of things we would just dump into the, the friendships let's go around and what a comment 11 the old school, uh, friendships. My favorite has to be Kaball and is marshmallow toasting. I'm a big fan of toasting marshmallows and the huge one that he cooks on his hood sort. It looks like I could spend an entire evening knowing on the darn things. Perfection. It's just awesome. And mortal Kombat 11. My favorite friendship has to be, Raiden's a great way to update your original friendship with kid thunder. And I'll speak to me to that part, awesome life balance performance, uh, that we've seen a lot of on the internet. I mean, that was just fantastic that they could pull that off. It's something that's often been asked of us, whether after mass confrontation, between Riaden and Lui Kan over whether or not to trust Shane soon, which directly calls back to a similar beat in mortal combat is DC universe is intended to make those events of MK DC Canon. And the answer is yes, definitely. For sure. Uh, we can assume that those events happened in one of Kronika's, many previous timelines, clearly she thought it was a mistake cause she rolled it back and got rid of it. But yeah, once we looked at this idea of timelines and multiple timelines, and we were hoping to be able to integrate a lot of, you know, the past lore, including MK DC. And it was a lot of fun for us to be able to reference that back. And we knew that our most observant fans and those folks that have been with us through the whole, the whole history of the game, we're going to pick up on that and see that similarity. Another question we get at the studio a lot is an aftermath prologue, where we hear that Fujin night Wolf and Shane song have been trapped by Kronika in a void. And that's where they've been during the events of the main game. And the question comes up is here, is this void new to mortal Kombat low? Well, actually it isn't, it's not something that's new void was first mentioned in scorpions by when MK deception. Uh, and that was something we saw in like, Oh, you know what? We can totally bring that back and use that for middle kombat 11. So one question we've gotten from folks who have perhaps not played all of the older mortal combat games is about Fujin and Shiva. If they played a big role in the mortal kombat aftermath story and sort of when were they first playable in the history of moral combat, Shiva made her first playable appearance back in mortal kombat Sri Fujin made his first playable appearance back mortal Kombat 4, however, that wasn't food, his first appearance in mortal Kombat lower. He first shows up as an opponent in mortal Kombat mythologies, subzero, subzero battles his way through the temple, on the elements. Well, that's all the questions that we have time for. I want to thank everyone who submitted a question and we were overwhelmed with the amount of questions. We had a lot of really great questions, and it took a lot of effort from a lot of people to sift through them, pick the ones that we can answer today. Um, there were a lot of really great questions about sort of the dark areas of the mortal Kombat universe of lays unsolved mysteries that would hopefully solve you today. Uh, of course there are still many more that are left and hopefully we can come back at another time and be able to answer more questions for people. Uh, for those of you out there whose names I might have mispronounced, I have to apologize for that. I feel your pain. I have a hard to pronounce last name, myself Cionciolo and it gets mispronounced constantly. So I know what that's like. I did my best if I didn't get it right, please feel free to hit me on Twitter, correct. My pronunciation. Um, that's it for now? Uh, thanks again from all the folks here in their own studios for joining us. And we hope to see you again soon.