‘Mortal Kombat XL’ PC Now In Steam Open Beta After Ed Boon Hint Drops
"Mortal Kombat XL," the updated edition of the latest entry in the "Mortal Kombat" franchise, is now available to for open beta testing for free on Steam, just days after series creator Ed Boon hinted at the version's release to the platform.
Fans of the "Mortal Kombat" series have been aching for a little over a year now ever since the latest game in the action fighting franchise, "Mortal Kombat X," launched in April last year. Thought the game was met with positive reviews and acclaim, those who bought the game for the PC platform ended up getting the shorter end of the stick after a disastrous launch on the platform. The PC release of the original "Mortal Kombat X" was decried by many for its various bugs, connectivity issues, and other general problems relating to porting a game from consoles to the PC.
"Mortal Kombat" PC fans got further irate earlier this year, when an enhanced version of the game was released by NetherRealm Studios but only to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles. Titled "Mortal Kombat XL," the version featured all of the game's previously released downloadable content releases in addition to various improvements for the game's netcode which meant better connectivity.
Recently however, the game's creator and NetherRealm Studio's creative director Ed Boon shared a message in his Twitter account that sent "Mortal Kombat" aficionados in a frenzy. Posting a picture of a circuit board, Boon captioned the image with the message "Maybe we should Karry eXtra Long People who Care?"
As Boon has long used the method of randomly capitalizing letters in strange sentences as a standard practice when dropping hints for his projects, one need to simply take the capitalized words to get his real meaning. Doing so for Boon's Twitter post will spell out "MKXL PC," which strongly suggested that he and his studio might be working on finally delivering the updated release to the platform.
It did not take long for further confirmation to arrive as an entry on SteamDB for a "MKXL Enhanced Online Beta" soon showed up. Going to the official "Mortal Kombat X" page on the Steam website indicates that the beta is actually the developers testing out the online gameplay of "Mortal Kombat XL."
What this means is that it is only a matter of time until "Mortal Kombat XL" truly releases for the PC on Steam, though the specifics of the package are not yet unknown. The "MKXL Online Enhanced Beta" is set to run until Monday, Aug. 29 at 10 a.m. PDT.