make it a more realistic fighting game, rather than "a fighting simulator". Character appearances were improved to make their moves "more responsive" to the player's input. They also wanted to bring back several characters they felt were absent for too long — including Sindel, Nightwolf, Baraka, and Mileena — and an arena with several weapons which players could use to fight; however, it was remade to become the Liu Kang's Tomb arena. Characters' combos were redesigned to be distinctive so that they would be more important; as Boon noted, they were necessary for any move the player would use to inflict more damage on an opponent. The Midway staff focused on the designs and functions of the backgrounds, wanting to make them as influential to the outcome of the battle as the fighting between the characters. Because of popular demand and favorable reception of Deadly Alliance, the number of finishing moves, known as Fatalities, increased to two per character. The Fatalities were developed by a group of animators led by Carlos Pesina; they comically described Mileena's Fatality in which she eats the opponents' neck as the most disturbing due to how her "sexy moves" are modeled from Pesina. The Hara-Kiri moves were added to allow the losers to perform a finishing move as well, creating a race between both players. The Death Traps, meant to be introduced in the previous game, were added to give the combat more strategy as well as to give more chances to players to win a fight if they are at a disadvantage. The game was originally meant to have other new finishing moves, such as tortures and falling cliffs similar to Fatalities. One of the main features of Deception was the emphasis on online gameplay, which had yet to become common for console fighting games. A team of engineers took almost a full year to decide if the feature was viable. The MK team focused their energies solely on platforms that had strong online functionality available to the end consumer; this led to a greater focus on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions. Because the GameCube games require some re-engineering compared to the other platforms when porting, it was decided to exclude the GameCube from the work of the team until the online hurdles were cleared. Some time after the game's release, Boon commented that he was disappointed that the GameCube version did not