Mortal Kombat 11 goes deep on character customization

At Mortal Kombat 11's reveal event today, series creator Ed Boon showed off new character customization options the developers have added this go-round. You'll be able to "create, modify, and collect multiple versions of every character," Boon explained. This starts with different skins, or outfits, for each character, and the characters also have three costume pieces. In Scorpion's case, that's a face mask, katana, and his "get over here" spear.

Your customization will show up in battle, and it seems like there's also more than just cosmetics at play here. Each piece of equipment has three "augment sockets" you'll be able to do something in.

There's a lot to take in here from a short demonstration. The customization menu has tabs for Gear (where you can choose equipment and fill in those augment sockets), Kosmetics, which let you change skins, cinematics, victories, fatalities, brutalities, and end of round taunts. There's also an Abilities tab for selecting ability sets—presumably collected from various movesets across MK's long history—and finally an AI Behavior tab for customizing an AI fighter.

Here's what we've seen so far. More as we learn it.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).