According to a new whisper from the outer rims of Earthrealm, Warner Bros. Games is apparently moving to cancel all their future Mortal Kombat 1 plans, including those related to both new fighters and new story content, due to the apparent sales failure of the game’s recent Khaos Reigns expansion pack.
Word of this apparent DLC fatality was first raised to the public on November 25th courtesy of /u/_FateUnknown, a noted Mortal Kombat 1-specific Reddit scooper whose track record includes the accurate leaking of Li Mei‘s return as a fighter, that Kenshi would both appear and have his sight restored, and the game’s dropping of the franchise’s Krypt mode.
Amidst a conversation on the /r/Mortalkombatleaks subreddit centered on the speculation by YouTuber Interloko that the next character DLC set – or Kombat Pack, as the game colloquially refers to them as – could likely see the addition of MK fighters Jade, Jarek, Blaze and the cybernetic Triborg, as well as the titular heroine of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Marvel Comics’ Wolverine, to the game’s roster.
Responding to the opening post, /u/_FateUnknown simply asserted, “It is not,” and when pressed for details as to whether there was “even going to be a Kombat Pack 3”, the scooper bluntly added, “No.”
Expanding on his information in a separate thread dedicated to his reveal, /u/_FateUnknown further explained, “Kombat Pack 3 and a second story expansion were planned. All cancelled recently, no more characters after Kombat Pack 2.”
“A Kameo or two might make it since there has been work done on them,” they added, offering players a slight glimmer of hope for some level of future support, “but I don’t know yet.”
Pressed for information as to why the third Kombat Pack was no longer in production, /u/_FateUnknown alleged, “Khaos Reigns sold poorly”.
Released on September 24th as MK1‘s second overall DLC offering, the Khaos Reigns expansion not only brought with it new arenas, skins, fighters – including Noob Saibot, the current female incarnations of Cyrax and Sektor, Scream‘s Ghostface, Terminator‘s T-1000, and the cinematic, Arnold Schwarzenegger-version of Conan the Barbarian – but also several new story chapters, which pick up in the immediate aftermath of the game’s main plot and see Liu Kang and crew banding together to protect their timeline from a villainous multiversal variant of Havik.
While these offerings in and of themselves were fairly par for the course when it came to the Mortal Kombat franchise’s usual post-release support, the same could not be said for the expansion’s price tag, which came in at a whopping $50 USD – meaning that players were expected to pay nearly as much as they would for the base game while only receiving less than a third of its content.
So while many players may have been interested in seeing Conan drive his sword through Goro’s four-armed torso, its exorbitant price tag – and to a lesser but still somewhat significant extent Netherrealms’ creative decisions, such as their attempt to sell the idea that the normal human Ghostface could survive in a tournament of superhuman fighters and their gender-swapping of Cyrax and Sektor – appears to have turned players off from checking out the Khaos Reigns expansion.
At current, neither Netherrealms nor Warner Bros. Games have yet offered public comment on their rumored cancellation of Mortal Kombat 1‘s future DLC.
Meanwhile, the last two fighters set to drop as part of Khaos Reigns‘ Kombat Pack 2, the T-1000 and Conan, are still being worked on ahead of their planned releases sometime in 2025.