10 Things WWE 2K21's REAL Replacement Needs To Fix

It’s easy to forget that hopes were high for WWE 2K20. After 2K19 had been an excellent step forward for the series, with the return of 2K Showcase, the first actually enjoyable MyCAREER and the best gameplay 2K had produced since they revamped the series in 2K15, it was expected that 2K and Visual Concepts would produce another stellar product.

Much has been said about the disaster that was 2K20’s launch. After almost twenty years of creating WWE games, Yuke’s moved on from the series, breaking their frustration coming from not being able to carry out their full vision of the WWE game they wanted to make. Control of the series was handed over to Visual Concepts, who had aided Yuke’s since 2014, but who were clearly not ready to take on full control of the series. As a result the game was released as an unfinished mess, resulting in a poor critical reception and a substantial decline in sales.

For this reason, WWE 2K21 has been cancelled with the series taking a year off (albeit with an arcade-led replacement), a strategy that has worked wonders for other franchises such as Assassin’s Creed. Yearly releases significantly hurt a developers ability to provide meaningful updates each year, and hopefully Visual Concepts and 2K are able to use the time to focus on some of 2K20’s biggest problems, as well as address issues which have affected the series for years.

Because the main series WILL be back - it has to be, given the units it sells - but to get back to greatness, it needs to fix a lot. And this is a good place to start...

Let's get the obvious one out of the way first.

Wrestling games have always been like Bethesda RPGs. Yes they always release with a large number of bugs, but that level of imperfection added a certain level of charm to the game. Watching John Cena's body slowly dissolve into the ring ropes, or seeing a chair fly into Row Z will always elicit a small chuckle from even the sternest wrestling fans.

However, much like Bethesda's disastrous Fallout 76, WWE 2K20 has far too many bugs, to the point where it is difficult to play a single game of it without encountering at least one. This becomes grating over time, and results in an experience where the player almost always expects something to go wrong in some way. Furthermore, many of these bugs are significantly worse than in previous games, meaning the ‘fun’ bugs of previous games have been replaced with game-breaking ones.

There is no doubt that getting the collision detection to be perfect and the animation of every punch precise is an extremely difficult task. However, when a publisher charges $60 for a game, players have (quite rightly) come to expect a certain level of polish, and unfortunatly, WWE 2K20 fell well short of that level.