I think we've just kind of taken it for granted that wrestling games are going to be bad from here on out, and nobody really cares anymore.
It's like how super hero / licensed movie games were 10 years ago. They were all terrible and we just pretty much took it for granted that any licensed game was going to be bad. And then Batman Arkham Asylum came out and even if you don't like that game now, it was seriously the first
good licensed movie game in ages, maybe since Spiderman on PS2 which still wasn't even that good it just
wasn't bad so it was shocking.
Licensed games are going down the shitter again as companies don't care about making good games for the license, they just need quick easy cash-ins to pay for the license.
The WWE games are just a sad example of a game series being taken hostage by a license. And, unfortunately, there is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome with it, not just because 'the bad game that you're comfortable with,' but because Yukes/2K
has done a lot of work in terms of building a huge roster. Like, if they left Yukes/2K annd gave the license to someone else to try, we could get a really creative good new wrestling game, but it'd likely be way scaled back in terms of roster and the simulation-type stuff for the first few years.
THe series is pretty hopeless now. It appeals to people who have bought the game every year for a generation, but has no cross over casual appeal at all, and I don't know if they could ever get that back.
People really overestimate how bad these games are. They're glitchy, they're stagnant, but each year there's enough fun to be had and as a fan of the current WWE product I enjoy them. The main issue is I wish they'd give us more than 1 WWE game. THQ was trying to do different things which lead to WWE All Stars which was an incredibly fun approach to a more casual WWE game. Now pretty much all the novel ideas are stuck on mobile, like isn't it stupid that Netherrealm makes a WWE game about superpowered wrestlers and it's stuck on iOS and Android? I feel like the WWE games used to be how a lot of people got into wrestling and I can't imagine the 2K games are doing that.
Yeah, I feel the same way about how people could get into wrestling through wrestling games, or at least, still enjoy wrestling games without being into wrestling on TV. Wrestling games used to have major cross over casual appeal because they were incredibly fun party games. They usually all supported 4 players simultaneously, and the good ones made it easy to quickly pick up and feel like you're contributing to the games even for someone who doesn't know much about how the game works. If you had 3 friends and 2 of them didn't really know much about wrestling or wrestling games, you could still do a TLC match and the people who knew little about it could still grab a chair and contribute to the match in some way. Despite the series kinda-sorta going the 'sim' approach, it made the older, simpler games a more accurate representation of professional wrestling. Pro wrestling is a choreographed, staged fight between people who are caricatures of real life... If the better man won every match, then pro wrestling would be boring, so instead you create drama by giving scenarios where someone
who shouldn't win can still look like they might win (I don't mean 50:50 booking, but just basically any match that isn't against enhancement talent). The old games intrinsically sort of understood this (I think unintentionally), so that someone who doesn't follow wrestling and who doesn't play wrestling games could still pick The Undertaker or Stone Cold, and then do a reasonably decent job getting in some offensive moves, enough to contribute to a match against someone who may play the games all the time. The people who played the games a lot understood the strategy of a match, which was more about planning out moves and countering finishers than it was about knowing the technical aspects of it... So someone who was a seasoned player would win most of the time, but every once in a while, your buddy who just picked it up the first time could get lucky and spam chair shots or some other "cheap" mechanic and would win... and
that's like the quintessential essence of pro-wrestling. The Undertaker upset Hulk Hogan at Survivor Series or This Tuesday in Texas or whatever
because Jake Roberts slid a chair in under the tombstone... ANd old wrestling games captured that much better than the new ones, where in the effort to make a "simulation" of pro wrestling they've, they've lost the essence of pro-wrestling.
I don't think people over estimate how bad they are, but the people who buy the games and enjoy them have become accustomed to the stilted gameplay and the series can really only appeal to someone who takes all of these weird, bad design decisions for granted. Now, I haven't put a significant amount of time into a WWE game since WWE 2K16... I just got fed up with that game and don't feel the need to spend $60 on the new ones (I still follow the games tho), so I know a lot of things have changed since then, but I still think there's serious, fundamental flaws with the basic elements of how the game works, and I don't think most of those elements have really changed, just been tweaked. The games can be enjoyed, but only if you
really understand how the mechanics work and have a blind spot for the baffling design decisions in the game.
I remember 3 or 4 years ago, the game was going to make a big push into being a 'sim,' to make it a wrestling sim. And I was like, okay, whatever, let's see if they pull it off. But, they haven't in 2 or 3 years. They're stuck in this in-between state of trying to simulate
a fight and trying to simulate
wrestling and they don't get either correct. The game is very complex for a new player to get into, whether it's things like chain wrestling at the beginning, or the grapple system, or how moves work, and most of these don't have any logical reason for them it's just "how it is," and you can only understand that if you've been playing the game for a long time. When I Was playign WWE 2K16 the best explanation for this was with how holds vs. moves worked. To perform a move (e.g., a body slam), you'd initiate a grapple, then press a face button and press a directional button at the same time. However, to perform a hold (e.g., a abdominal stretch or something), you'd initative a grapple, then tap or repeatedly press the face button, and hit a direction. This isn't intuitive and because the game lacks input feedback, it'd be very confusing. Like, if you press a button and your character doesn't do something, you intrinsically think to press the button again, and that second press is what turns it into a hold instead of slam. Friends would come over and we'd fire up a game only to be frustrated because they could only perform sleeper holds
over and over and even with a guy like Hogan (who I don't think performed a single sleeper hold from 1985 - 1993 in WWF), was turned into the king of sleepers. A problem with this would be that holds would get punished by the game, your character would get booed, you'd get negative feedback from the announcer, you wouldn't get your special meter building up, you wouldn't deal damage, etc. I had to come on gaf and ask "How the hell do you body slam a guy? All I can do are sleepers!" This is only one example (and maybe this one's been changed), but these sort of unintuitive design decisions permeate the whole game.
I know they've tweaked the very unpopular submission system and so it's probably different now, but again, it was a weird design decision, where they were making
a professional wrestling game, but then trying to add these "sim" like mechanics to it... that wouldn't really make it into any more of a sim, they'd just abstract out the
wrestling and put that into a marble-based minigame. It ended up creating this really inbalanced, unintuitive system where performing rudimentary setup moves like, say, body slams or suplexes, ended up being a lot more complex and difficult than performing the wrestler's special move, which would usually just require pressing 1 button (Triangle, or w/e). They've maintained the (smart) simple approach to do a special, which is just hit one button at the right time (a decision that THQ/Yukes games smartly introduced ages ago), but then they've made everything else into this "sim" mode which loses the point of wrestling games. The story mode was even worse in this way, back when they had the Hulkamania mode or the Steve Austin mode, where doing
simple things was incredibly difficult, and you'd spend 5 minutes just desperately trying to figure out how to get your opponent onto his stomach/prone so that the game would initiate a QTE cut scene where your character would perform these very advanced sequences of maneuvers by the player just hitting A or X a couple of times.
Just fundamentally the decisions to make the game that way are weird decisions for a pro-wrestling game, and the game ends up existing in this place that isn't a wrestling simulator (but has some wrestling simulator aspects), it's not a fighting simulator (but tries to do some stuff from EA MMA and other fight sims), it's not an arcade wrestling games (but tries to do a lot of arcade wrestling aspects), and so it ends up not having a good balance of anything and it gets pulled in these weird decisions. It then tries to abstract everything out into weird mini games (the pin mini game, the submission mini game, the 'grab the belt' ladder match minigame, climb the cage minigame, etc).
