WWE 2K22 Exclusive Interview With Creative Director and Art Director

[ChaseB]

Brian Mazique had an opportunity to sit down with WWE 2K22 creative director Lynell Jinks and...

Written By: Chase Becotte

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[satchmykels]

I don't know if my interest in the game has changed much, but that interview was a load of fun!! Thanks to Brian, Lynell and Christina for an enjoyable 40 minutes that I'll never get back. haha

[nikethebike]

I agree nice interesting interview!

For me though - it is a bit concerning that the art director seems to know just about nothing about wrestling/wrestling video games...


Why is she even in this interview? What does she add to it? One or two answers about the perspective of a non-wrestling video game fan? She mostly just get to sit there in the middle of the screen... Not really many questions aimed at her...



Otherwise it sounds interesting, but they are also saying that they have been taking out things from the game to make it more stable and not a bug-fest. So I bet there can be people disappointed in taken out features. However I guess 2K20 showed they NEED stability so i have 100% understanding about they focusing on that now... Features can come later...

About the controls they talked a lot about button-combos, button mashing... It sounds like they are changing the mechanics into a fighting engine? I really hope that it's not a - press X, [], X, O combo to make a bodyslam type of change... Was it old WCW Nitro that had that type of controls? And sucked...

Anyway, I hope this will be good, but on the other hand I'll probably be playing SVR4EVER.

[DanH35]

Quote: Originally Posted by nikethebike

About the controls they talked a lot about button-combos, button mashing... It sounds like they are changing the mechanics into a fighting engine? I really hope that it's not a - press X, [], X, O combo to make a bodyslam type of change... Was it old WCW Nitro that had that type of controls? And sucked...

Not sure about WCW Nitro, but the old Acclaim wrestling games (WWF Warzone, WWF Attitude, the ECW games) were like that. I really hope that’s not what it means, I can’t see the game being successful with that type of game engine. Hopefully the combos they were mentioning means some type of chaining moves, not complicated button combos to perform a single suplex.

[nikethebike]

Quote: Originally Posted by DanH35

complicated button combos to perform a single suplex.

If you want you can definitely interpret what they said as there can be a risk of this. Especially if the team they put on this game know as much about wrestling games as their Art Director gave the impression of.
They might want to hook casual gamers by making it more of a fighter than wrestling sim. That would definitely "hit different".


On the other hand, I would be extremely surprised if they did mess the controls up that way.

About controls in general, I kind of liked the old SYM controls, because I thought it was more realistic to not have to grapple all the time to do a move, since those grapple animations don't really happen that way in real life. That game had way too few move slots though.



If I got to design my own control scheme I always wanted that punches and grapple moves would be treated the same way so that missed punches etc wouldn't look so stupid. I also wanted a variant of controls where say [] was one move, X+up was one move, O+down another. I also wanted to use R1/L1 etc as modifiers so that R1+X+up could hold yet another move and so on. I also wanted total freedom to map anything in all of these slots (also irish whip etc) and also be able to set counter moves, to avoid things like having a generic gutwrench suplex or dropkick as counter for someone who never ever did one...
Then I'd have a logic section where it was possible to set how often the wrestler attempted the move in certain situations - something similar to how Fire Pro does it. Imagine the amount of time people would spend on tweaking and sharing logic for legends and current stars online.


IMO that would be a great base for a wrestling control scheme.


It'll be interesting to follow the development this year though.

[Hooe]

For a game which is ostensibly a wrestling-themed head-to-head fighting game as opposed to a dramatic re-enactment of the spectacle of wrestling, the controls for older WWE 2K games were insultingly simple.

To that end, I'm all for introducing some mechanical mastery into the offensive part of the game. Maybe not full-on dial-up moves like Mortal Kombat, but something to create a stronger connection between the commands one is creating with the controller and the actions happening on the screen. Previous WWE 2K games have basically been "press Circle to do everything"; that's not going to cut it for a competitive game going forward.

[Mercury112491]

Yeah I did get a bit nervous when they mentioned regular fighting game type moves. But the game can’t get much worse so I’m willing to wait and see. They did go out of their wait to mention that Battlegrounds is the Arcade game this is the Sim game so we’ll see. Either way I’m at least happy they had such a forth coming interview. You don’t see thah a lot.


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

[nikethebike]

Quote: Originally Posted by Mercury112491

Yeah I did get a bit nervous when they mentioned regular fighting game type moves. But the game can’t get much worse so I’m willing to wait and see. They did go out of their wait to mention that Battlegrounds is the Arcade game this is the Sim game so we’ll see. Either way I’m at least happy they had such a forth coming interview. You don’t see thah a lot. Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

Yeah, the interview was very appreciated. Adds to the hype. And it felt like they were honest, promoting the game, but not lying about them having to limit some aspects of the game aswell.