Mortal Kombat 11 Developer Was Diagnosed with PTSD Due to Graphic Violence - Sensationalist Headlines

Can we stop mentally fucking up all the talented, hard working artists we have please thanks.

A quick glance at Deviant Art show just how many genuinely talented 3d and 2d artists make things like this in their free time anyways, (or things worse). Honestly Ive played the game a through and seen a lot of fatalities, but a game like Binding of Issac is still more vile to me regardless of how realistic either represents things.

It kind of reminds me of some of the stuff they show'd us in combat training. Every couple of days they'd sit us all in a room and play videos of terrorists getting blown to bits and shot up with Metal Music over it. You'd see guys with faces that looked like hamburger or A FACE ripped clean from the skull just kind of sitting in rubble. Of course the whole idea was to try and desensitize you to that stuff, and in a way it did, but there were a lot of things that could have gone unseen. I'm not sure why exactly they made people watch all the shit you'd find on liveleak and worse, as multiple people have noted you could have come up with all sorts of gruesome things by using an anatomy book and some imagination. Besides its not like the goal is to make a true to life violence game, the whole thing is supposed to be over the top and excessive with little regard to how things actually happen.

I feel it's not put enough out there that, based on the wording of the article and quotes (which could be wrong, I guess), this stuff was mostly voluntary on the part of those who were actually watching for reference. While it should definitely be explained in the hiring/application process of the artists, knowing the kind of game Mortal Kombat is, you'd expect SOME sort of this stuff going on. I don't condone this activity if the company was forcefully making the employees watching this stuff for reference, but it does (as someone said earlier in this thread) add some macabre and morbid feeling to the game. I would think this is much less of reference in terms of texture/models, and more for inspiration in terms of facial animation and bodily animation. You can still make stuff goofy looking (use Johnny Cage's MK11 fatalities for reference), but for more serious characters, I think the more violent/gratuitous kills are more entertaining. I'm sure some people will equate my opinion on that as "he likes watching people get murdered" but, to be honest, my Photoshop class in High School did this for one of our zombie projects and the students seemed fine (save for 1 or 2 who opted out of the project). My thoughts and sympathies are with the employee experiencing PTSD. because I have it firsthand after being in an extremely violent car accident and almost losing an arm. It's not fun in the slightest, and I hope they get the help they need. But I feel a lot of people are jumping on a bandwagon here even though this game was expected to be more violent than it's predecessors. Every next installment has been, except MK vs DC of course. Just my thoughts on this whole thing. I'm playing some devil's advocate mostly because Ed over at NRS has always been a kind guy and I don't see him trying to forcefully instill PTSD or make any sort of realistic depictions/threats of violence in any way in his games. If you think headbutting someone's head hard enough to make it explode, you're thinking out of the realm of possibility. They purposefully make these things extremely over the top so that they avoid the very real probability of people taking inspiration from fatalities/moves and such.

I think the reporting here is possibly sensationalized. To me it seems more likely that some employees were looking up IRL gore to make the fatalities more realistic, but they were doing it in an office where other people could see it and become traumatized. If I were to play a vid like that in my office (let's say I'm reviewing material for a law professor or something and pulled up a NSFL evidence of the crime) and a coworker saw it I'd probably be fired on the spot for being a dumb asshole and threatening the mental well-being of my co-workers with material that should not be shown at work. Assuming the person in question was exposed to it as such (the vague wording makes it seem probable as anti-NR sentiment is high so more fuel to the fire means more ad revenue) the devs watching it should have had the common decency to do it in private to not expose others to it. I think this is a huge HR violation and it may have gone unreported because someone who wants to keep their job might worry that if management knew they were affected by gore (when they work on a gory series) it would be a huge mark against them as they'd be a liability to the company and a manager might assume they're not capable to do their job.

Felt the same way back in the 2000's with the ukranians hammering a poor guy

This sounds like an urban legend from the 90s

I was pretty okay with the fatalities up to MKX even, but some of the ones in 11 are straight up disgusting. Maybe I'm the outlier, but I prefer a stupid decapitation uppercut than a guy getting his skin ripped off. Not fun to play a game that actively makes me ill.