Screen Rant recently sat down with Creative Director Lynell Jinks, Associate Gameplay Producer Bryan Williams, and Showcase Lead Designer Dino Zucconi to discuss a variety of topics regarding WWE 2K23.
One of the top things that were talked about was the debut of the WarGames match into the video game series. Lynell Jinks described how the foundation was created last year to ultimately introduce the War Games match into the series.
“We really started on it in 2K22, but indirectly,” Jinks said. “In order for us to rebuild the gameplay engine from the ground up, we had to tear everything apart and figure out like, alright, one day, what are we going to want to be able to do? We’re going to want to be able to traverse freely, we’re going to want to be able to walk up to a ledge and just kind of climb it – in years past it was impossible, right? Everything was kind of hard-coded, where you’re like, “Oh, if I want to go to the ring, the ring has to be at this location. And so once we rebuilt the engine from the ground up, we’re like, “oh my gosh,” you know?
“We looked at it when we did Backstage Brawl 2K22 and you’re like, “Oh, you can climb up on this platform, wrestle on top of it, there’s no ropes and you can still, you know, wrestle on this mat like surface?” Cool, what else can we do now? And we’re like, you know, WarGames, with it on a PLE and then NXT, there’s two rings, that’s kind of scary. And so we tried it, like, “Alright, what happens if you put a cage around it? Yeah, it kind of works.” And then you’re like, “Okay, now let’s think about everything else.”
Williams backed up that sentiment by explaining that the way WWE 2K was previously created made it nearly impossible to include WarGames.
“The engine wasn’t really built to handle something of that magnitude,” Williams said. “The team’s gone in, they did their magic, I’m no engineer or programmer, these guys are like wizards to me. They went in there and they did their thing, and it was the optimum time to do it. Especially, and I mentioned this before in another interview, but the timing, I mean, the team started developing this, you know, way ahead of Survivor Series of last year, but when that news broke that Triple H were bringing WarGames to the main roster for the first time we were all just like, “This is fantastic. Wow.”
“So you can, you know, play it in the NXT arena. You can also – and again, strength and props to the team. When that event happened in Survivor Series, I think Lynell you were like, “Hey, what are the chances of us getting the Survivor Series arena before WarGames?” And the team, they were like, “Yeah, you know, we’ve got to do it.” And the team did in record time.”
Williams also mentioned that you can switch between your teammates freely if you are playing the game solo.
“When you have your new partners enter the match, you can freely switch control from one member of your team to the other by pressing the back button,” he said. “So you’re not stuck controlling the one Superstar that you selected before launching into the match, which I think is a huge aspect of the match. It actually helps strategically, if you see one of your teammates getting walloped, you can say, “Okay, I can take control, my teammate over here needs my help.” So you can just swap controlling them and manage the match that way.”
You can read the entire interview here.
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