Upgrading a PS4 Mortal Kombat 11 to the PS5 version. What does it get you? This has been a question that has gone unanswered since the initial announcement of the free PS5 upgrade. The confusion stemmed from NeverRealm stating that the PS5 upgrade would update the PS4 Mortal Kombat 11 to an ‘Ultimate Edition’.
D4G are finally going to solve this mystery. Now with Mortal Kombat 11 Standard Edition in hand, it’s time to see just what the free PS5 upgrade will offer…
(This may be a Special Edition but with the two free bits of DLC not having anything to do with the paid Kombat Pack content, this will be classed as a Standard Edition).
Once the MK 11 disc was loaded into my PS5, you can see the free PS5 upgrade option appear. Once selected, it advised the full PS5 version of Mortal Kombat 11 would be downloaded, and that I’d need to keep using the PS4 disc in order to play (as expected, really).
Once the download started, I could see that it was downloading Mortal Kombat Ultimate Edition. Good so far…
but we’re not out of the Dead Woods yet…
Once the game had downloaded enough to play, you could clearly see the game branded as the Ultimate Edition on start-up and at the bottom right in the games front-end:
Heading to the character select screen, I could see the full character line-up, but most of the paid content was still downloading. I now used the DLC codes I received with my retail purchase (Kold War Skarlet and Shao Kahn).
Once the downloading has completed, I launched MK11 again to find all boot-up and in-game logos had changed to ‘Mortal Kombat’ (and no sign of the ‘Ultimate’ branding). Yup, the game had been moved back to Standard Edition. Once I loaded the character select screen, all paid character preview boxes had been completely removed. Confusing, right?
Well there’s more…
The MK11 PS5 update had started to download more content in the background, as well as an update (1.25 patch at the time of writing this). Once this had finished, I restarted the game…to now be greeted by ‘Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate Edition’ at boot-up. This was becoming a rollercoaster and at this point, I had no idea on the version I’d been upgraded to.
Finally, after everything had downloaded, the game was still branded as Ultimate Edition on game boot-up, but all Kombat Pack characters were unavailable (but visible with the option to purchase). The logo in the bottom right corner, now read simply ‘Mortal Kombat’.
Can a retail standard version of MK11 be updated to MK11 Ultimate?
Unfortunately, no. After the MK 11 PS5 Update rollercoaster had come to a complete halt, I was left with my Standard version (I still had Kold War Scarlet, so chuffed with that). Pretty messy, right? However, there are a few possible explanations:
1. The Standard Edition I purchased came with Kold War Skarlet and Shao Kahn DLC, making this a Special Edition. There is a possibility that adding these during the games initial installation, could have conflicted with the game being classed as Standard or Ultimate Edition?
2. The PS5’s operating system is still in very early stages and reports of download issues and system crashes (when removing external storage) have been brought to our attention recently. These may have possibly even caused game upgrading issues like this. Such bugs should be ironed-out in a system update patch soon.
3. Ultimate Edition may now have two separate meanings by NeverRealm. The first would offer all paid story and Kombat Pack content but the second, simply means the Standard game with all PS5 features (4K, fast loading times etc.).
Did you successfully upgrade to the all content Ultimate version from a Standard Edition download/retail disc? Did you even have issues upgrading from an all content Ultimate Edition? (or with any Kombat Packs you purchased separately). Hit the comments below and let us know?
