New Mortal Kombat X Dev Diary Reveals Living Towers and Faction Wars

In a dev diary coming from NetherRealm today, we’ve got more details on some of the new modes you can play through in Mortal Kombat X. One of the modes revealed is the new Tower mode, which functions a lot like the Challenge Tower from Mortal Kombat 9 but with several different Towers for you to tackle. You have Klassic Towers which contain the usual Test Your Might and Test Your Luck modes, as well as standard challenge sequences and even an Endless mode.

You have Living Towers which are online-only Towers which are constantly changing, with there being specific Daily Towers for you to grind out, as well as special Premier Towers for that extra challenge, along with Quick Towers if you just want a rapid fight. These Towers may even change on the hour, so people who want to be the top of the Leaderboards better be fast. One major change is that unlike the Challenge Towers from Mortal Kombat 9, you can actually pick your fighter in Mortal Kombat X, which is a very welcome alteration.

The Faction system was also detailed, which we previously mentioned in another Mortal Kombat X article. It acts as the game’s persistent online component and meta-game across every version of Mortal Kombat X. You pick one of 5 factions and you are rewarded for pretty much anything you do for your faction, so completing a Tower or winning a Ranked Match will contribute to your Faction score. You’ll get even more points if you defeat an enemy faction member while completing a task and players will be rewarded for supporting their Faction. At the end of every week, a winner will be declared and the war will begin anew the following week. Also, random Invasion events will happen which will force you to band together and defeat enemies from another Realm like Chaosrealm or Outworld which adds another layer of competition to proceed.

While the Tower modes sound fun and a constant way to test your skills in fighting, very similar to the dailies in a game like Spelunky, I’m not so enthralled with the Faction War system. Yes, it is a fun little online event and it is nice that all versions of Mortal Kombat X are connected via the system, I just don’t think it has the legs to really interest fans over a long period. Unless there are some tangible rewards and benefits for building Faction points, it will just fade into the background as players just wish to play Ranked Matches and improve their game, rather than get invested in the possibility that Special Forces beats the Lin Kuei this week. This persistent meta-games never really seem to catch on outside of MMOs but I hope Mortal Kombat X proves me wrong on this front.

Check out the dev diary below and look out for more Mortal Kombat X news very soon: