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WWE 2K22 will use a “new philosophical foundation” to deliver a game that improves upon six fundamentals of the series (via Destructoid).
No, that isn’t a typo, because there will be no WWE entry to be released this year. The calamitous launch of WWE 2K20 in 2019 led to a lot of umm-ing and ahh-ing from developer Visual Concepts and publisher 2K Games. To sum up, it sounded like, “how can we make sure this never happens again?” The answer was to cancel WWE 2K21, and offer spin-off title WWE 2K Battlegrounds in the interim, which will be all kinds of “arcade-style action and over-the-top Superstar designs, environments and moves.”
What’s the plan for WWE 2K22, then? The first step seemed to be to bring Patrick Gilmore (who’s got credits on Disney’s Aladdin, the Killer Instinct reboot, and Medal of Honor) on board. Gilmore shed a little light on the future of the series in a recent Reddit AMA, where he said that there will be “an all-new philosophical foundation” underpinning WWE 2K22. Citing titles like WWF: No Mercy and WWF SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain as sources of inspiration, the team wants to recreate the feeling of those classic games in the next entry to WWE.
Moreover, the developer is structuring its efforts around six core elements of a WWE game. These are “Core Gameplay, Online, Character Creation, Character Appearance, Emergence (essentially taut physics and control) and WWEX,” the last one of these being the secret ingredient which really delivers the WWE brand in the gameplay experience.
It is also possible that WWE 2K22 will be a live game, and may even support mods for the PC offering. Of course, this may change over the course of the year, but it does sound optimistic. We’ll keep you in the loop once we know more about the new game.