The latest big update to Mortal Kombat 11 is live and along with character balancing, an updated shop, and bug fixes, new features were added to the game. However, there is one notable feature that is missing, despite being announced alongside the others. That feature is the inclusion of a new mode in Towers of Time called team raids.
In this mode, you and two other players online fight one overpowered character at the same time. You don't see them fighting the boss character but you can see their health bars and the damage they are doing to the character. You can also do coordinated mini-challenges with your online partners during the fight in order to gain helpful modifiers.
This is an odd inclusion as this seems to be an attempt by NetherRealm Studios to include raids in a genre that doesn't have raids. Truthfully, the fighting games genre doesn't really lend itself to raids at all. With some exceptions such as Super Smash Bros, fighting games are regulated to one fighter versus one other fighter. Even in tag fighters like Marvel vs Capcom Infinite or Dragon Ball FighterZ, only one fighter can be out at a time.
And well, tag challenges already exist in the Towers of Time, making this new mode kind of redundant. If NetherRealm wanted to have more cooperative modes in the game, they should have thought of something more dissimilar to what they already had.
In fact, that's a mode fans of Mortal Kombat have been waiting for since the Mortal Kombat reboot: the inclusion of tag combat. Ever since it was included in the reboot, fans have wanted tag battles to be readily available online, offline in versus mode and possibly elsewhere.
NetherRealm Studios seems to want to give Mortal Kombat 11 a continuous flow of content and that's appreciated. That said, something like this doesn't do what extra content is meant to do, and that entices players to come to play the game or to come back to play the game.
During the same announcement, they announced a third variation for characters and Brutal difficulty will now reward you with skins and gear for the player you're using. Those things are more likely to bring back and entice players than the raid mode since it tells players there are more ways to play these characters now as well as completing the challenges at a high difficulty will be better rewarded.
Team raids mode has yet to be released but fan reception to the announcement has been mixed. One can hope this means perhaps they're tweaking it to make it better or more interesting.