Injustice: NetherRealm developing new system to push DLC characters to users' consoles

NetherRealm Studios is developing a new system to push Injustice: Gods Among Us downloadable content to all users' consoles.

The idea is that the game will connect to the internet whenever it's played and download the information required so that you'll be able to play against those who use DLC characters even if you haven't bought them.

"In Mortal Kombat we had downloadable characters," NetherRealm boss Ed Boon told Eurogamer. "We want to come up with a way to push all that information onto people's machines so if I buy some character that was available for download, you would have it on your machine and I would be able to fight against you online.

"We're coming up with a great automated system to make sure I can use my character against anybody and everything's compatible."

With the release of Street Fighter x Tekken Japanese company Capcom came in for criticism for including DLC characters on-disc. There were then unlocked once players forked out cash for them.

"All of the DLC stuff will be downloadable," Boon confirmed. "We're not going to have it on the disc already and you unlock it. We want to make sure we get it onto people's machines."

When Mortal Kombat launched last year fans complained about the online game, with crippling lag experienced by many. Boon said the development team had worked to improve this for Injustice, the DC fighting game due out next year.

"Every game we try to look back and see what could have been better," he said. "We're optimising our network code. For the inputs being sent back and forth we have a new, more elaborate system. And then we also have more things where groups of people participate in more of a round robin, and there's a meta-game in there. There's a lot of cool stuff coming for online."

For Injustice NetherRealm will use the system it introduced with Mortal Kombat for updates and patches that allows the developer to make tweaks to the game without players having to download any data.

"It'll be all in the background," Boon said. "We can tune nobs and get it on everybody's machine. Let's say there's a punch, and you animate it at a certain speed. If you decide the punch is too fast, we have the ability to go into that code and find the speed, let's say it's playing at 2x speed, we can change that to 1.8, or 1.7, and slow it down slightly for everybody's machine."

So how does it work? "Everybody's machine, when it goes online, it looks for any changes and then grabs them and puts them on the machine," Boon explained. "That's the idea of keeping everybody the same.

"Inevitably with fighting games you can balance it as much as you can, but once millions of people get their hands on it, somebody will inevitably find advantages. So we can dial that down."