It’s Hard to Get Excited for WWE 2K22

It’s been so long since the release of a new entry into the WWE 2K series that it’s natural to see a WWE 2K22 logo and immediately get excited. There was a time when you would get 2-3 wrestling games released in a calendar year, so the fact that we haven’t had a new game since WWE 2K20 released back on October 22^nd, 2019 has wrestling fans starving for something fresh.

2K Games shifting development from longtime wrestling developer Yukes over to their internal team was a…bumpy transition to say the least. Bumpy is a nicer way of saying a complete and utter mess, right? The character models looked worse; you couldn’t go a single match without running into a few game-breaking bugs, and the creation suite was so unusable that even the most dedicated content creators refused to touch it. They even changed the control scheme for some reason. Not even large patches could fix the game. In fact, sometimes they just broke the game even more.

The backlash of WWE 2K20 forced 2K’s hand and they had to take a year off to re-work the game from the ground up. To their credit (I guess?), they did keep the WWE 2K19 servers online despite their original plans to turn them off in early 2020.

At any given time, you could look up my Gamertag on Xbox Live or PSN and you will see that I’m playing WWE 2K19. I love that game so much that I own it on both consoles, and I play both of those versions daily. Not only has the community of creators kept the game updated with the latest wrestlers, arenas, and championships from AEW, WWE, and other companies, but projects such as ECW Lives and Indy Spirit have gone far beyond just paying homage to wrestling days past and have created these wonderful games within a game.

For shits and giggles, let’s just say that 2K is able to fix all of the issues and bugs that plagued WWE 2K20. You can hit the ropes without ragdolling, the story mode doesn’t look like it was developed for the Xbox 360, and you can download something from the community and have it not appear as a blank white surface. Even if they’re able to make a game that is at least as solid as Yukes worst efforts, I’m still going to have a hard time getting excited for it. 

That hesitation isn’t entirely on 2K, either. Fair or not, a lot of it comes from the current state of the WWE product itself. 

Missing Superstars

The absence of certain superstars is something that 2K games has no control over, and while you will likely see these missing individuals pop up in the community creations, there is something that gets lost by not having them in the base game. 2K19 has a giant roster of legends and superstars from both WWE and NXT. Aside from the absence of Tommaso Ciampa, Buddy Murphy, and Nikki Cross, it was a deep roster from a time when every superstar seemed like the sky was the limit. Personally, that 2013-2016 era of WWE/NXT rekindled my love for professional wrestling, and it’s one of the things that I’ll miss most when 2K22 is released. A lot of the superstars that made up that era will be missing. 

After a brief glimpse over the WWE 2K19 roster, here’s a list of those that won’t be in WWE 2K22 based on their termination or contract expiring…

Imagine running a wrestling company and releasing the Iiconics and Samoa Joe…

Sure, there will be additions, but aside from WALTER and Tegan Nox, what new superstars would you be excited to play as? T-Bar? LA Knight? And even for those that are on the roster now, there are always going to be a handful that are excluded for some reason. It’s also going to be really weird to not have Sting, Brock Lesnar, Christian, and Big Show in a WWE game.

And again, assuming that the community creation features are better than 2K20’s, someone is going to create all of those missing superstars, and they’re probably even going to look better than 2K’s in-game models, but still, it sucks.

Bells and Whistles

Professional wrestling is 50% wrestling and 50% presentation. So much work is put into making a superstar’s look and entrance match their character. Since the release of 2K20 to now, one of the WWE’s biggest assets when it comes to presentation, musical composers, the CFO$, have parted ways with the company. The details of that split have never been confirmed but it was messy. This split has led to several members of the roster being forced to change their theme music. That makes a larger impact than you might think. Someone like Aleister Black is going to go from ominously rising from the stage like Dracula and epically walking down the ramp to Incendiary to having a Jacob Cass-like generic entrance.   

The thought of not having the Undisputed Era’s theme in the game hurts my soul.

Arena-wise, because of the pandemic, all shows have either been held at the WWE Performance Center or WWE’s Thunderdome — Wrestlemania included. So many LEDs and 11-year old’s on their webcams. You would have to assume that 2K22 will feature the revamped Raw and WWE Smackdown arenas, but those are pretty dated at this point.

Lack of New Features

Could WWE 2K22 be the game that finally allows us to play inside of WAR GAMES?!?! I hope so, but there must be a reason for why that hasn’t happened in previous iterations–and 2K22 is still coming out on that same hardware. Plus, just imagine the glitchy clusterfuck that two rings would be. But outside of that, what new match types could they possibly offer up?

I would love nothing more than to be wrong with all of this. 2K have had over a year to work on getting back into the good graces of wrestling fans; hopefully, they’ve got something up their sleeve. But the WWE product is really working against them at this point.