Here’s the question and answer session from this week’s Killer Instinct Textual Stream with Microsoft’s Adam Isgreen…

Will there be an update on the Female Announcer? or is that info going to be shared later in April/Later?

Later, but still in plan.

Would the devs be open to a No Blood option?

Certainly.

Are Classic Costumes going to see colors 7-9 at any point?

Currently we’re not planning these.

Will there be more ranks within the killer rank to enable more player levelling in terms of evenly skilled matchups. If you can’t confirm either way, do you think it would make the killer rank a more fair and fun fight With a more structured skill ranking system?

We continue to look at ranks and the league system. Changes are coming!

Will there be dialogue between the rivals, sort of how street fighter 4 did their rivals?

The rival scene is narrated in the same way as the intros we teased at PAX.

Many fans really want to see Ultimates. If Season 3 becomes a thing, will Ultimates be something that will be added, or can we just forget about that possibility?

Shago’s ultimate only works on his stage right now, and it’s the only stage that it can work on. Unfortunately the stages weren’t built with ultimates in mind, and considering how different each one would be across the entire cast, there’s tons of rework and test that would need to happen in order to enable them on top of just making them in the first place. It’s not an easy task, and we’ll continue to talk about them.

Any plans to do more to smooth out the UI? It can be sluggish at times, especially the cursor in the character select.

We’re always looking at improvements. Post in the bug thread where / how you’re experiencing issues!

Hi ADAM, i remember in other post ask you something . and you answered me , “i don’t like inconsistencies”I totally agree with you!. I ask: the story mode for session 1 will be remade to match the beautiful season 2 history mode ?

This is an ongoing discussion with features we’d have in a possible S3.

Regarding ARIA, is she a human being or something completely different?

She is not human… or maybe she’s the most human of them all.

Could you talk about some of the design decisions behind Riptor, mainly why IG has decided to take the full-on dinosaur route rather than the snake/human mutant hybrid as depicted in KI1?

We wanted to rationalize her design a bit more towards believability. Yes, we’re a fighting game full of fantastic and crazy stuff, but it’s always nice to make some things even a slight bit more believable from a tech/science perspective.

Are you planning on adding an online Practice mode?

This is high on our list of things for the future.

Will you be making the stage select screen more accessible (similar to the new character select screen)?

Eventually, we’re going to have to rework this screen because selecting through 16+ stages in linear order is going to get slow. It’s just a question of when at this point.

Is the sibling to the Season 2 character mentioned for S3 a Riptor clone? Mayas brother? or TJs sister?

Nope, nope, and… nope.

Are the armour pieces on Cinder part of his base model or are they accessories?

Some are base, some are accessories. Back & neck, shoulders, and legs are the three accessory areas for him.

Is there any update concerning a possible PC release of Killer Instinct? I know I sound like a broken record but the demand is definitely there so is doing one just a matter of time/resources type of scenario or is it more of a legalistics thing? What are the internal discussions about this at MS like? Insight is always great to have.

Obviously (we) Microsoft believes in Windows as a gaming platform (I’m running Win 10 and I LOVE IT), so conversations are always happening, but there’s no news on this right now.

Do you plan on giving all future characters recaptures and if so will you revisit Fulgore, Thunder, Jago, Spinal and Glacius and give them recaptures as well so they don’t feel out of place going forward.

We didn’t originally intend that most/all S2 characters had recapture. However, it’s become a thing. The S1 cast is still incredible, and arguably some of the top characters are still S1 characters even without any new mechanics like recapture. That said, we’ll take a good look at this after S2 is wrapped up and see if there’s places any of the S1 cast (beyond Sabre and Orchid) could benefit from that addition.

will cinders flame change color when chossing a diferent color. or will his flames stay red and body different color?

Plan is to change the flame color.

Why is it not possible for two gamertags on the same XBox One to gain XP/Unlocks/Achievements when playing local multiplayer? This is not at all ideal for married couples or roommates who like to play the game together. As a result of this, I’ve spent far and wide more time as P2 on my wife’s profile and am having to fully reboot the game under my GT to get achievements and unlocks for my profile. I imagine that my time spent as P2 will also not affect Shadows Mode in any shape or form.

This is one of those “sounds easy but isn’t” features. The fundamental way the player (user) is handled in the code would need to be completely rewritten in order to support this. We all want this feature, believe me, but the time expense of it is what’s keeping us from committing to it. We’ll continue to look at ways to get to this, however.

Thanks for reading all these questions. I know you said you were exploring a “peace out” or breaker option for multiple ultras; has there been any progress on that front?

You can safely quit once you’re being ultraed and should not take a disconnect penalty, just the match loss. If that’s not working for you, please tell us! A smoother option would be nice in the future, though.

For those of us who are attempting to unlock all of the achievements for KI – is there any chance of tracked achievement progress being restored with the Achievements app? Other games (and KI used to do this, too) show both a numerical display and progress bar to give you an idea how close you are to completing Achievements. The way it is now, there isn’t any real way to know how close you actually are to things like the Battle-Worn or Chosen One achievements.

This is another one of the ones we want to implement, but haven’t figured out a clear way that doesn’t cause user pain if we do. If we did this right now, anyone working towards achievements they have not yet earned would have their progress completely reset in the new system, and we hate that notion.

Most gamers believe that it must be easy to port a game from console to pc(prime example will be emulators. Not saying KI should be emulated.) Can you explain the difficulty of porting a game, such as KI, to PC?

Secure networking, multiplayer concerns, test matrix of every video card, video driver, controller driver, network driver and chipset, DX version, motherboard, CPU, firmware, drive configurations, and every memory configuration you could possibly imagine… and then massive amounts of anti-cheating thinking and work beyond that; keyboard & mouse support (if any). Consoles are great because you’re building for one target machine and spec. PCs are not that at all. There’s also the question of minimum spec vs. look of the game, etc.

So who is a larger character MB/GB wise. Cinder or Glacius?

Cinder is around TJ’s height. Glacius is much taller.