Mortal Kombat 1 has received a stealthy and quick update that targets a recent issue that sprung up with the addition of latest DLC character Ghostface. The slasher film icon was released to quite a bit of good reception before that ultimately ended up tainted by the discovery of some devastating, inescapable set ups.
The community found numerous ways to put their opponents into what are essentially touch of death, infinite combo loops that used Ghostface’s knife throw cancel in Assassin mode at their core. As of right now, the entire ability to cancel out of Ghostface’s knife throw has been temporarily removed from the game.
Some players started noticing something was up earlier today when they were in training mode with Ghostface and couldn’t seem to get the knife cancels to work. This lead to a handful of folks hitting social media to report that they couldn’t do it and they couldn’t figure out why.
The official Mortal Kombat 1 Twitter account has since released a tweet that announces the temporary removal of this ability. In the tweet, the developers note that the knife throw cancel can lead to infinite combos and that it has been disabled for the time being while they further investigate the issue.
“We have issued a temporary change that has removed Ghostface’s ability to knife throw cancel while we look further into this issue that can lead into an infinite kombo,” wrote the official Mortal Kombat 1 Twitter account. “The cancel will be returning soon in an upcoming patch. #MK1”
We have issued a temporary change that has removed Ghostface’s ability to knife throw cancel while we look further into this issue that can lead into an infinite kombo.
The cancel will be returning soon in an upcoming patch. #MK1
— Mortal Kombat 1 (@MortalKombat) December 5, 2024
Footage of the change in action has been shared by several fans on Twitter already. This footage from iScream demonstrates that even though the cancel inputs still appear in the command list, Ghostface physically can no longer do them at this time and will eventually always throw the knife instead.
STEALTH FIX
So it appears they’ve put out a stealth patch to fix Ghostface’s infinite in the assassin variations.
You can no longer dash cancel his Knife toss. Instead he will throw the knife regardless. #MK1
(Credit to @YavedGaming for making me aware) pic.twitter.com/TDPiIigmO9
— iScream (@iScreamFGC) December 5, 2024
This is an interesting tactic we’ve seen a handful of times now from fighting games that live underneath the Warner Bros. Games umbrella.
It isn’t common to see something completely taken out of a game while it’s being worked on and fixed, but we have seen this several times now from MultiVersus where most notoriously the Iron Giant was removed completely from the game’s roster for being too broken before being added back after fixing.
Ultimately, though, this should hopefully work out for the better as Ghostface’s infinite combos were already starting to cause problems. The technique was so strong, in fact, that the character was already seeing tournament bans so that players wouldn’t exploit the unintentional ability.