Brian Mazique had an opportunity to sit down with WWE 2K22 creative director Lynell Jinks to discuss the newest features and gameplay options in WWE 2K22 via Operation Sports.
When asked about how the creation suite was altered from the last game, Jinks said that they had to risk quantity in order to improve quality. He said “For us, we looked at the creation suite and everything we gave to users in previous years. We pretty much offered everything, and the things we felt like we were offering were solid but flawed. By giving people too much freedom, now you are messing with quality. We had to put certain constraints on things to make sure the quality bar is on par with the games of today. You look at our partners at NBA 2K and there is a gap in quality. They did not have as many options as we had as far as being able to customize. Their players looked as good as the NBA players. There is a disconnect there with us. We focused on making sure that we are providing the users with high quality artwork that they can go and customize to their hearts content.”
Players may be asking what exactly was implemented into the game that improves the customization from WWE 2K20. Lynell Jinks revealed two interesting bits of information that players will like. First, Jinks revealed that the ever popular Community Creations will now be cross-platform. In prior years, PlayStation users could only access and download content that was created by a PlayStation user. In the upcoming game, it does not matter if it was created in Windows, Xbox, or PlayStation, it will be available for everyone.
Secondly, Jinks said, “I’m proud to announce that we have custom images that you can use in the menus so for a character select screen, you can put your photo on the screen.” This is different from past games that had WWE renders in the character selection screen and custom looking renders for created superstars, leaving a big disconnect in how they looked.
Unfortunately, some of the creation features had to be removed or completely untouched. Jinks mentioned that Create a finisher is no longer in the game. He said “There are so many things that we look at from past games and you look at the good and the bad. I know with ‘Create A Finisher’ in previous games many people complained about blending and artificial looking things that users could cheese. With everything we have done this year, do we try and introduce a feature like that where we will probably have those same types of issues? This game is a simulation. Every year we are trying to really fine tune that balance between excessive controls, fun, and still being a simulation with realism. Not saying it is off the table forever, but with everything that we’ve done this year, we felt like it was safer for us to focus on the things that we have on our plate right now.”
On top of that, the replay suite was left untouched. Jinks said, “Unfortunately we have not expanded on the replay suite. It is one of the things that we know has a ton of traction to expose more controls and have more presets. Just, you know, having more functionality. Unfortunately we just didn’t have the capacity to put effort into redesigning that system. I’m listening but this year no.”
When it comes to the creation suite, one of the most popular requested features is ‘Create A Story’. WWE 2K14 was the last time this mode was in the game. Speaking about this, Lynell Jinks said “We basically built 2K20 by creating a whole brand new tool for our developers to use to create stories for MyCareer and Showcase. So that was just for developers. We have full control and tools in order to dig into the rest of our code. To expose that same functionality for a user to where its not intimidating yet they have full control, that is a huge monumental task. We know that is something players want, but we need to figure out how to create our tools to the best of our abilities and figure out what we can offer as a service. Just know that some of the things you just said we don’t even have access to with our tools.”
You can watch the entire interview below. If you use any of the quotes above, please credit Operation Sports with a h/t to John Clark at Wrestlezone for transcribing.
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