1. Crowd Reactions
Perhaps the most exciting part of the newly refined Predator 2.0 engine is its newly renewed focus on crowd reactions. If you ever watch a WWE documentary, or observe a wrestler in an interview outside of the
kayfabe, youll understand how important crowd reaction is to them; to us watching at home; to the whole damn business. Its all they talk about. Crowd reaction is the fuel that makes the whole WWE wheel turn. During his presentation, Ledesma indicated that fans werent fully happy about the crowd reaction system in WWE 12; to a large extent theyd never been fully happy about it since way back in the original PSX Smackdown. It was just never fully there. The crowd reacted sure, but sometimes theyd be hushed again before Undertaker had even finished his Chokeslam. And that would NEVER happen. Well good news, I can personally vouch for WWE 13s crowd reaction system. It. Is. Awesome. The braying of the crowd has been mapped to specific moves (the crowd will scream for longer during a long-winded Tombstone Piledriver for example, but in a shorter, equally intense burst for a quicker move like the Stone Cold Stunner), and just like the commentary, the actual crowd audio has been lifted directly from live WWE broadcasts. The results are quite astonishing; whenever the crowd react in WWE 13 to a finisher, a chair shot or a Spectacular Moment they well and truly lift the roof off the arena, and your front room. And it feels like youre really there. I cant describe how much this simple development changes the entire face of the game; if theres one way quick way to feel an audience of 60,000 + is in the palm of your hand, WWE 13 would be it. In the limited time that we got to see it in action, we were thoroughly impressed with WWE 13. And we thanks the lord that we don't have much longer to wait until we can get our mitts on a copy. It's due out in the UK on the 2nd of November (US on the 30th of October) on Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.