Will Sports Entertainment’s PlayStation 4 main event suplex the demons of the series’ past? Matthew Pellett travels to SummerSlam to run the ropes with WWE 2K15’s new-gen debut.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages – er, so long as you’re 16 or over in order to comply with the likely PEGI rating, that is. After an extended exile in old-gen territories, the WWE series has finally made its way onto the PS4 card thanks to an alliance between old developer Yuke’s and new publisher 2K’s NBA team Visual Concepts.
WWE 2K14 was too far into development under the THQ badge for significant changes to be made when the license fell into 2K’s hands at the start of 2013, so WWE 2K15 is being billed as the first true title of the 2K era – and before I’ve even thrown my first in-game chop it’s clear this year’s grappler is significantly different from all of those that have gone before. Though 2K’s asset team wouldn’t want you to know it with this meagre selection of screens, the jump in visual fidelity is as big a leap as when WWE switched from standard definition programming to Full HD.
Awesomeness awaits
Sitting back and watching the entrances of John Cena, Randy Orton, Cesaro and Goldust – four of the five playable characters in the build I’m testing – is quite the transformative experience: focusing on the leading men and the camera tracking, I genuinely feel like I’m watching Raw for the first time in the series’ history. If I’m being picky I’d argue Cena’s and Cesaro’s cheekbones look a tad too puffy, and Cena’s eyes aren’t quite right, but Orton’s entrance is handsdown the most realistic interpretation not just of WWE programming, but of sports in games. I’m talking visuals, animations, camera angles… the works.
We’ve got Visual Concepts’ NBA body-scanning tech to thank for this: the WWE stars have had not just their bodies rescanned for the new game, but a series of facial expressions too, so they’ll grimace when they take a stiff punch to the gut, or break out a cheeky heel smirk after pulling the wool over the ref’s eyes. Finally (FINALLY!), the days of complaining that 2008’s TNA Impact is better looking than the most recent WWE output is at an end. WWE 2K15 looks every bit the new-gen proposition.
The leap in visuals comes at a cost, however. When WWE programming moved into the realms of HD there was great internal concern that better feeds would show the cracks in the Sports Entertainment facade: superstars’ spray tan edges, receding hairlines, loud and obvious in-ring calls between the grapplers and so on. In a similar way, the upgrade in 2K15’s game visuals is torpedoed somewhat by inconsistencies. The most obvious involves those who weren’t scanned.
WWE 13 had the Attitude Era mode. WWE 2K14 had the 30 Years Of WrestleMania mode. WWE 2K15 has an equivalent mode called 2K Showcase, which focuses on two major superstar rivalries: HBK vs HHH, and John Cena vs CM Punk. And as all WWE fans should know, CM Punk and WWE had a very public split earlier this year. CM Punk, it should surprise nobody to learn, wasn’t scanned for the game.
The sight of non-scanned characters is a GTS to the effort gone into everything else. The scanned superstars are stunning; the sight of King and Cole wheeling back in their chairs and then scarpering when I approach the announce table – a table covered in headsets and iPads, I should add – is impressive; seeing Justin Roberts and (the sadly now-futureendeavoured) Mark Yeaton scarper into the time-keeper’s area, leaving their chairs behind for me to grab, puts a smile on my face; the crowd, while falling short of jaw-dropping status thanks to the age-old issue of repeated animations, is a real step up from past efforts (at one point I count four different types of pro-Cena shirt in the first few rows – a depressingly accurate observation). But when a goblin-faced CM Punk is centre-mat, and Vince McMahon shows up duringthe Money In The Bank Pay-Per-View title match looking like Dobby The House Elf, there’s a distinct Knees2Faces effect on the otherwise great presentation.
Perhaps tellingly, my hands-on is PS4-only. Obviously 2K’s keen to show off the new-gen iteration, but at this point we’ve had no visibility on the PS3 version of the game, which isn’t going to feature the scanned superstars for hardware limitation reasons. While a new lighting model should ensure the old-gen version is a visual step up from WWE 2K14, don’t expect the types of character models you’re seeing on these pages.
King of the ring
Grip the top rope and steady yourself now: the visual upgrade? It’s not even close to being the most important overhaul of WWE 2K15. That honour goes to the pace of the matches themselves. Significant changes to fighting mechanics means that old strategies are na-na-na-naa’d out of the arena, and a whole new set of skills must be employed to secure the all-important three-count.
In what’s sure to be a divisive move, most one-on-one matches begin with chain wrestling sequences. Pitched as a way to gain an early advantage in a bout, these sequences are rockpaper-scissors-style button presses for grapple hold superiority, followed by right-stick-leaning mini-games where the goal is to find and hold a sweet spot before your opponent to deal damage or reverse the hold. I can see it growing wearisome if these chain sequences aren’t dished out in moderation (I’m assured they won’t appear in every fight), but these happened up to three times during every single match I played.
With chain wrestling sequences completed, the next shock hits me like an enziguri: the stamina gauge is back, and every move has a cooldown effect of sorts. I’m no longer able to spam strikes by stabbing r over and over – I need to methodically pick and choose my moves, and my opponent must do the same. It’s a brave but brilliant move by 2K, because it removes button-spamming attacks from 2K15 entirely and forces you to play tactically. It also gives the person on the painful end of a beatdown more chance of fighting back than ever before: laying face down on the canvas and soaking up hit after hit after hit like a jobber is a thing of the past.
Fatigue now helps to tell a story within each match. Get knocked down after the bell rings and you’ll spring up pretty quickly, but get planted with a finisher 15 minutes later and you’ll probably need to crawl to the ropes and use them to clamber back to your feet should you survive the pin attempt. Those ropes are fully interactive now – the feet and arms of wrestlers getting slammed near the ring extremities will catch the ropes for added realism.
Even without seeing the MyCareer mode (in which you create a superstar and work up from the Performance Center, through NXT, to Raw and, ultimately, the Hall Of Fame), the improved WWE Universe mode or the Creation Suite, and only sampling a single match from the 2K Showcase story, there are plenty of talking points off the back of my hands-on time. I play over 15 Exhibition matches in all (with Normal and No Hold’s Barred rules in effect), and as somebody who’s stuck with the series ever since 2000’s WWF SmackDown I’m impressed by some of the subtle additions only veterans will notice, such as the super-close was-it/wasn’t-it two-count animation that had me leaping off my seat.
Then there are the character skills. These have been vastly expanded so that every superstar plays and feels completely different to all others. Cesaro has 19 skills, for instance, including Combo Striker (four-strike combos activated), Royal Rumble Finisher (instant-elimination finishers for the marquee January PPV), Barricade Breaks (the abillity to smash through into the time-keeper’s area with the returning OMG! moves) and many more. Though it may be odd to consider that some superstars no longer have old staples such as, say, top-rope moves, it makes total sense in the context of realism. Rest In Peace, digi-Mark Henry’s diving elbow.
But despite the hefty list of changes, WWE 2K15 is just the first step on the long road to perfection. “We’re never, ever, ever satisfied with the games we build,” says producer Mark Little. “2K15 is a giant leap forward, but our team’s already talking about all the things we want to do next year. There’s a very long list of things we want to bring to the table.”
To that I say: get the tables!