Are you enjoying Mortal Kombat 1 so far? Well, despite NetherRealm Studios’ MK1 being one of the best fighting games we’ve played in quite a while, some players are facing some rather frustrating issues with the experience. We know we’ve seen the Mortal Kombat 1 servers down a few times since launch, but there seems to be a whole host of Mortal Kombat 1 input bugs plaguing players. We don’t know about you, but coming across any one of these could ruin your next Kombat League session.
If you’re pressing the attack as one of your favorite Mortal Kombat 1 characters and your opponent jumps over your fighter, you would expect your character to automatically flip, right? Well, it looks like that’s not always the case when you’re playing Mortal Kombat 1 – depending on your inputs. If you’re in the middle of a kombo using a forward-moving attack, you may find that Mortal Kombat 1 delays reflecting the visual change of the fighters switching sides on the stage and the mechanical input of your controller.
We know this sounds a little technical, but this short clip from content creator Maximillian ‘Maximilian Dood’ Christensen showcases it perfectly in Practice. Holding the forward input while an opponent is knocked over the player character doesn’t always instantaneously flip the control input to match the visual input of the two fighters switching sides. This causes the attacking player to walk in the wrong direction – leaving them open to attack – for a second (which is a long time in a game where each frame matters).
You can check out the clip below:
Now, this isn’t something we have experienced ourselves while playing Mortal Kombat 1 – also on PlayStation 5 – but, Maximilian Dood isn’t alone in experiencing this. It might not happen for as long, but caster and content creator Evan Hashimoto has also been able to replicate this Mortal Kombat 1 input delay issue a number of times. You can see an example of this in the X (formerly Twitter) social media post below:
I've been loving MK1, but one thing I think REALLY needs to be fixed is how the input reader reads people crossing over/through you.
Two BIG examples: The most clear one is that if you're holding forwards or backwards, sometimes your character auto walks the OPPOSITE direction. pic.twitter.com/NEtpKnrCXn
— Evan Hashimoto 🍇CEOTaku (@EGPWonderChef) September 17, 2023
From what we can tell, this only seems to occur when you’re holding down a horizontal directional input when fighters switch sides. Hashimoto has shared another short clip online – which you can find on X here – that shows a ‘down forward 2’ attack registered as a ‘down back 2’ attack as it is performed as the fighters switch sides on the stage.
The attack itself still lands, so it’s not as big of an issue as it could be, but it does make starting kombos when the sides are swapped tricky. It seems like a slight input delay at times, but it’s also something that seems to stop the player evading attack – the one swapping sides while the other starts to input an attack – being punished for evading the attack quite as much. You can, of course, attack while in the air, but an attack input on the ground is almost always going to play out quicker than one that comes after a jumping input.
It does seem like input delays are plaguing Mortal Kombat 1 in more ways than one, though. Hashimoto has also highlighted a strange issue where certain kombos that require several repeated inputs prior to a special input – such as an ‘A, A, down forward Y’ combo – only register the repeated input. With release check off – which activates an input when a button is released, not pressed – it’s clear that this is more definitively an input registration issue.
It’s also something that applies to Mortal Kombat 1 Kameo fighters, on occasion too. So, if something doesn’t play out in the way you thought it would, it really might not be your fault.
Will NetherRealm Studios address this issue? Well, at the moment, it’s hard to tell. However, the developer is “looking into” this missing Mortal Kombat 1 feature. So, there’s nothing to say that it won’t look into the input delays too. We can imagine, though, in some cases, these will stay the same and be something fighting game fans will just have to contend with moving forward (pun intended).