It appears that it has been a confusion lately as to what engine the latest Mortal Kombat game, Mortal Kombat 11, uses. While we knew that the game was based on a custom Unreal Engine 3 version, some people thought that the game would be using Unreal Engine 4. As such, NetherRealm Studios Programming Lead Jon Greenberg has shed some light on what exactly is going on here.
As Greenberg stated, the current-gen version of Mortal Kombat 11 uses NetherRealm’s custom Unreal Engine 3 which appears to be – like pretty much all custom engines – radically different than what Epic Games is currently offering.
To whoever keeps changing the Mortal Kombat 11 Wikipedia page to claim the game uses UE4… while I appreciate the intention and while we take this as a compliment, MK11 is built on NRS's custom UE3 version. And yes, our ver of UE3 is radically different from Epic's at this pt.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 5, 2019
On the other hand, the mobile version of Mortal Kombat 11 will be indeed using Unreal Engine 4.
Yup. Mobile is using UE4, and footage got mixed in. We're all in the same building, and in some cases, some folks end up working on both.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 5, 2019
Greenberg also explained why NetherRealm decided to use its custom engine instead of adopting the newer Unreal Engine 4 for this latest Mortal Kombat game on current-gen platforms.
The real answer is long and pretty complicated. The short version: evolving our engine let us start working on the game the day IJ2 was completed rather than making the team wait while we rebuilt everything (years and years worth of stuff, much of which we would need) in UE4.
— Jon Greenberg (@Jontology) March 6, 2019
