Creative Director of Iron Galaxy Studios Kraig Kujawa brings us this weeks textual stream as unfortunately Adam is sick this week. Get better buddy!

You can go to the ultra-combo site to read it directly or read the stream below:

Hey everyone,

Thanks for being patient. Hope you all have been racking up the XP during our Promotion period. Remember, it ends next Monday, 12/8, so squeeze in as many matches as you can to level up early and often! Once the promotion ends, you will still see an increase in earned XP during your matches, but it won’t be quite as sky-high as it is right now. We’ll be running more events with bonus XP in the future, so keep watching for them!

Today I want to talk about a feature from S1 that we’re revamping for S2, adding features and renaming: Story Mode. When we took a hard look at Arcade Mode, we realized it had the potential to be so much more. One of the coolest things about it is that there were so many endings and ways to unlock them. We also found that some players don’t even know what the criteria were or that the multiple endings existed! So we wanted to address that issue and also give everyone a fun roadmap and some nice unlockables for all of their effort. Here’s how we feel that the all-new Story Mode (formerly known as Arcade Mode) does just that:





Season 1 Story Mode has a special mural that you can unlock. That’s your overall goal. And it is a BEAUTIFUL mural. Each time that you complete a Season 1 Story Ending, you unlock a piece of this mural. Think of it like a puzzle. To complete it, you must unlock all of the Story Mode endings. Once the Mural is unlocked, you also will receive a special Story Mode Player Card background that’s unique to finishing the mural. But that’s not all – once you compete all three Story Mode endings for any specific Season 1 character, you also earn a lump sum of XP. This will be a great opportunity to significantly accelerate your level-up process!

Another new feature for the Story Mode is that we varied up the ending unlock criteria. As you know, in the prior S1 Arcade Mode, all of the criteria were the same no matter the character. We hope that changing these up will keep the mode fresh and challenging as you spend the time to unlock the endings. Now many of you have already unlocked a bunch of the endings, and we have good news for you: If you have already unlocked endings in Season 1, these endings will stay unlocked and you’ll also immediately unlock the accompanying mural pieces and XP rewards as a result. You will also be able to view all the unlocked endings right on this page as well as in the Collections Menu.

You can see that we’re putting more of an emphasis on Killer Instinct’s narrative and as such we felt that Arcade Mode was really about the game’s story, hence the name change.

This revamped mode will arrive along with Riptor before Christmas (whose character portrait you can see in this mock-up). Hope you enjoy it!

Here’s the Mural Landing Page with all Unlock Criteria. Three pieces have been unlocked here. I’ve blocked out the reward.







And here’s the special Story Mode Character Select. Hmmm who is that under Kan-Ra?? :



…and here’s some answers from the Q&A thread I posted yesterday:

Will Dojo ever be updated?

Yep, elpanel0n – once we have more characters finished, we plan on updating the Dojo later next year with some character-specific trials.

Will there be a Quick-switch Button between the Single and Multiplayer Menus?

Yep, early next year.

Seriously, what are Boosters?

Treble000 and GamerLCD, here’s the funny thing: we don’t even know. Since we have XP as a core mechanic of the game, we knew we might want to offer multipliers or other ways to accelerate XP. We currently don’t have any designed for this at the moment beyond a handful of ideas, none of which involve anything that you purchase! So that was basically my way of saying we don’t know either.

How much will the UI be changing?

It’s ever-evolving. The next update will see the installation of Story Mode, and a few new little enhancements, bug fixes, and requests from the community. Here’s a couple for the December update:

• Character Select will now show an Coming Soon ETA for new characters

• You can now buy things directly from the Collections Screen

Is there any chance that the front on combos (IE: “Monster”, “Crazy”, etc.) will be updated to match the rest of the game?

Yeah, we debate this internally and watch feedback on the forums, and it seems to be a 50/50 split. We agree that it doesn’t exactly match up, but it also looks pretty darned good. It may be something that we look at by the end of Season 2.

Will Character Select get faster?

To the billion of you that asked, we’re investigating a few potential solutions to speed it up and hope to optimize the screen over time. The biggest issue are the super-detailed character models and accessories that get loaded in with each character. Not a super-easy problem to solve, but we’re on it.

Has Max started writing any story yet, or is that still in the brainstorming phase?

Max is collaborating on the story alongside Iron Galaxy and Microsoft folks. Kurt Tillmanns from IG and Adam Isgreen from Microsoft are very heavily involved. I throw in random comments here and there.

Will the ‘Zoom’ feature return for when you accessorize your character?

Potentially!

Will we ever see more single-player/off-line modes?

Yep. We’re working on some big stuff. Revamped Story Mode for Season 1 is just the beginning.



Who is your favorite KI Character so far?

Thanks for asking. Quancro – it’s Riptor by a mile. I really think Kan-Ra is super-cool, I’m just not good at using him.

Will there be an option to disable the analog stick?

Hey Fawz, we’re aware of this being a top community request. Alex Jebailey, our community manager asks me about this almost every week. We want to do it. It’s just a matter of finding the time next year to get it done.

When’s the textual stream?

Seriously, Frodo54. You burned your Q on that? This is it! 🙂