WWE 2K22 MyGM Preview: Lots of Plot, Lots of Menu Time

Selection of matchmaking decisions. Projected story arcs. Rate events among your friends. All this meta chat is essential for professional fandoms, especially in the age of social media. WWE 2K22, launched in March, will interact with all by bring a familiar management modecalled MyGM, puts players in the role of promoters facing great expectations from WWE’s top management.

2K Sports on Wednesday gave Polygon a hands-on preview of MyGM, along with the game’s standard wrestling gameplay. This is the first time the general manager role has been part of a video game career mode since THQ’s SmackDown vs. Raw 2008. The WWE 2K series has had similarities to the team and single player careers of the sports video games – MyCareer (now known as MyRise) and Universe Mode. A GM career is like a one-season mode, such as MLB The Show’s March to October Parcel.

“The universe is like God Mode, right? Where you have complete control over the entire program you’re working on,” said creative director Lynell Jinks during a media roundtable on Thursday. “MyGM is more goal-based. […] It’s so engrossed in the WWE Universe, rather than the Universe [Mode]where it’s more like your sandbox. ”

Image: Visual Concepts / Sports 2K

In other words, the player is working for the “Company” – the WWE itself – as one of five existing management characters or a created character. You’re answering Triple H, a top WWE executive both behind the scenes and as a character. Essentially, Triple H is overseeing a competition of subordinates; The player will play against an AI or another friend who also manages one of the tournament’s four broadcast brands —SmackDown, Raw, NXT or NXT UK. Your goal is to have a top rated program. As a management email, Triple H will request specific results over time. Players who don’t set them up will be in big trouble.

In this respect, the job is not to manage the pacing of the story and the competitive plots, but to ensure that fan-pleasing pairings are developed and that their combinations are They make a good TV show. MyGM started with a superstar draft (as a career did in SvR 2008) and budget constraints you hire about a dozen wrestlers for the season. Pool is random game to game. Jinks and art producer Christina Diem Pham say players need to develop a mix of weight classes, alignments, genders and fighting styles, and a random team that supports more than word outlines. a full squad.

My number one pick is Drew McIntyre, a two-time WWE Champion who has the highest popularity and stamina of any pick on my team. The properties are most important to the background calculations MyGM is doing to simulate fan interest. Popularity means what it says; The events of the fighter will be more attractive. Similarly, fitness affects their readiness as well as the quality of their performance.

This applies to matches simulated in the menu as well as matches that the user chooses to play or watch as a CPU-CPU demonstration. In the two MyGM matches I’ve taken over and fought in, neither dominating a match nor drawing it with a wrestler’s full arsenal seemed to affect the overall rating of the event, although Pham says it’s possible to “assess how you play your matches to get better at ranking,” it’s possible to extract a little extra motivation from a given match by actually putting your hands up. remote controll.

Image: Visual Concepts / Sports 2K

“But after that, it depends on how you build your matches from your superstars and also on the production value,” she said, reflecting on things like the size and type of arena, the upcoming lane team. put everything and fireworks package you choose. “There’s a lot of math going on,” Jinks said. “There’s a lot going on below the surface.”

Where a GM more directly influences the popularity of a match, beyond putting two fan-favorite fighters together, are things like scheduling runs, where a third wrestler intervenes. Enter the match to help one of the participants. But that kind of match is automatically simulated in the background; you can’t observe it, nor can you join and let a third AI fighter enter the ring midway, for example. The two promotions you can schedule are like a dice roll in their performance; you cannot see or hear Big E or Alexa Bliss calling someone on camera.

Not having to watch a CPU vs CPU match has a lot to offer. In spite of WWE 2K22 benefits from streamlined gameplay that features big combos and counterattacks into the mix, along with more essential blocks and standard hits, it doesn’t show up when two AIs are fighting. A table match is prolonged by the fact that the table repeatedly collapses on random collisions (instead of someone being smashed over it, according to the rules). A main event battle between title holder Mandy Rose (GM gets to pick their champion before the season even starts) and Nikki ASH lasts forever, and Nikki never Any landing of her eight wire attacks. The GM can choose a background that simulates an ongoing battle, but it’s like starting a war.

The weak point of the AI ​​vs AI battle and the rather noisy background emulation means that MyGM is most engaging when users are fighting at least one of the matches, which is probably how most people do it. want to play this mode anyway. With a large amount of time spent in menus or getting the results of background dice rolls, MyGM’s larger use seems to be some kind of contextual or structural wrapper, serving up what would be battles. One-time match that I wanted to try out of curiosity’s interest.

This is not to say that there is no behind-the-scenes management of a show. It just seems to develop slowly. For example, the first event always takes place in a high school gym, with no option to spend extra money to upgrade its production or marketing value. Players start their MyGM careers with around $2 million in the bank, allowing them to choose up to 12 or 13 stars; they can also end the draft after eight picks. The extra money could be spent on a bunch of untrained freelancers, with shorter contract terms, but you should probably save that money when a WWE legend comes along, whether whether it’s Goldberg putting an end to an unexpected champion’s reign, or just turning on the microphone to promote the next broadcast. Timing your biggest moves to coincide with or culminate in the next pay-per-view event is essentially winning play. You can also learn your own stats or sabotage your opponent’s program with single-use privilege cards.

MyGM isn’t necessarily open-ended as I first thought; a lot of that depends on using superstars created in matches or as player character presenters. We do not have access to those created players or toolkits for a limited time with this build. I tend to build weird homages to the racers of the 1980s, but I don’t really develop their characters with competitions or goals other than being the next champion. .

MyGM seems to be a useful, if somewhat limited, toolkit that offers outstanding narrative support and plenty of headcanon opportunities that I haven’t reviewed. Both are crucial to my enduring enjoyment of a sports video game, and they’re also the hardest to reliably develop.

WWE 2K22Released on March 11 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X, will reveal more.