WWE 2K19: 5 Things We’d Like To See

It’s that time again, folks. 2K Games are churning out another WWE sim for us all to chow down on some fantasy booking with. Of course, as each year passes, 2K are faced with an ever-growing list of challenges as they try to inject some originality into the series. Last year’s biggest innovation came with the revamping of the online modes and some slight changes to the presentation, although as someone who rarely steps out of the realms of single-player, it seemed like very little had changed since the previous instalments.

It’s hard to truly narrow down why 2K Games fail to capture the entire demographic every year. There’s nothing explicitly bad about these games, just that there’s not much in the way of progress aside from a few roster additions.

So, hey, Mr. 2K Games dev, here are 5 things you might want to look into to try and drum up some intrigue for this year’s episode of WWE 2K.

 

1. GM Mode

General Manager mode has been one of those things that crop up every year in people’s wishlists. Management sims have been popular in pretty much every sport franchise; FIFA, NBA, NHL games all have their own spin on the mode in which you take on the role of coach or manager. WWE have indeed had a crack at this before, back when THQ were running the show.

First seen in Smackdown vs Raw 2006, players had the chance to take over a brand of their choice and compete for ratings, profits and other such business-y things. What made it most fun was the ability to create your own ideal roster, headlined by people that weren’t John Cena and book everything the way you wanted things to go.

In a culture where every wrestling fan is an armchair creative writer, GM Mode would go down a treat. Universe Mode has been a sorry attempt at re-creating the genuinely tactical game mode from the SVR era, but here’s hoping that we’ll see a return in this year’s edition.

 

2. A bigger roster

It’s hard to keep the vibe of your game feeling fresh when the landscape of WWE changes on a weekly basis. One week someone’s feuding with Daniel Bryan and the next they’re blacklisted. So for the game to maintain the appeal of feeling new is to once again expand the roster with all the newest faces that have appeared on both the main roster and NXT, while also rendering as many alumni characters as possible.

2K tend to use the buzzwords of ‘biggest roster ever’ pretty much every year. They manage to get around this by including at least two versions of as many superstars as they can for the sake of filling out an extra few spaces. This is really starting to irk me. Quite frankly, I don’t really see DDP ’92 as a necessary inclusion; I’m sure the game will sell a few copies if we just include the one version of him. So let’s trim the fat and use all these wasted spaces for some newer faces that have yet to break into the 2K series.

ECW legends have seem to be forgotten about, minus Rob Van Dam who made it into last year’s game. Perhaps a few more Cruiserweights from 205 Live and yesteryear’s WCW division? What of The Great Khali? Where’s Max Moon?

Getting that extra 10-20 faces can help make it look like you’ve made the effort to make a bigger roster, even if some names have moved on since or have been replaced by superstars with considerably more fame.

 

3. A well-written campaign

Wrestling game stories have never been the most thrilling, in fact they’ve been downright cringe at times, lest we forget Candice Michelle turning your chosen superstar into a woman.

Nevertheless, sports-sims are slowly adapting to the single-player campaign market and are producing some tolerable story modes. NBA started the trend with a Spike Lee directed campaign, FIFA have since picked it up as well as some other sports franchises. Time for WWE to get on the bandwagon and write up a little feel-good story of their own.

Career Mode has been a staple of the 2K games, giving us some decent attempts at making a choice-based campaign, but never really filling the gap in the series. The story pretty much writes itself – you create your wrestler and take him from his NXT tryout at the PC to his main roster debut and then onto ‘Mania. Sounds simple enough, but the challenge would be to do so without making it feel tedious.

I’m certain there’s a ton of rejected storyline ideas that were set to be used on Raw and Smackdown, so grab a few of those, get some voice-overs done and there’s your campaign.

Spoiler: Roman goes over in the final cutscene, your character raises his hand in respect.

 

4. Fix the online again

It’s hard to let this slide every year — the online is appalling. Whether it be laggy servers or just having an uninteresting set-up, there’s always something that puts me off even attempting to go online.

Even though the 2K games aren’t even close to being a fighting game, there’s something you can learn from the likes of Tekken, Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Grab yourself a quick-match system that can connect you with someone instantly and give you a decent enough server to have a match on. Have a tournament mode for those that consider themselves good enough players. Do some special events from time to time to get some traction and there’s your online modes.

Again, this is coming from someone who doesn’t even look at the online modes these days, so this is probably tame compared to what players who have suffered through the lag and the pain of it all have to say.

Fix it, fools.

 

5. More DLC

The DLC comes and goes in a flash every year. I’m pretty sure that by the start of this year we had seen the last of the DLC released for 2K18. I mean, it’s great that they’re not holding back on extra content, but perhaps if you’re only going to have three packs worth of new stuff then spread them out a little more to make it seem like there’s more on the horizon.

The Legends and Rising Stars packs are consistently included as part of the DLC, so expect the same to happen this year with any additions to the roster from Mania onwards. But perhaps if 2K were to infiltrate one of the tapings post-release to grab a render of anyone that missed the boat, then we’d have even more DLC to keep ourselves invested in the product for more than just a few months.

I struggled to justify buying the season pass for 2K18. If it wasn’t for The Hardys being a part of the DLC then it’s highly unlikely that I would have gone out of my way for it. This year should hopefully have the likes of Ricochet, EC3 and the impressive Hall of Fame class to boost interest in the DLC, but more names would never go amiss.

WWE 2K19 is available for pre-order now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. More coverage will drop as and when announcements happen, so keep your eyes open to see if any of our wishlist is confirmed for this year’s game.