The WWE 2K franchise has spent the last couple of years finding its feet again after the disastrously received WWE 2K20, with last year’s WWE 2K23 being quite a solid effort in my estimation, even if it wasn’t quite the cohesive overall package I was hoping for. This year’s WWE 2K24 looks to build on that sturdy foundation with a wider array of new features than last year, including a new 2K Showcase celebrating WrestleMania’s 40th birthday, several new match types, gameplay updates like Super Finishers, and more (you can check out my full hands-on impressions here).
As in the past, I was able to sit down with WWE 2K gameplay producer Bryan Williams to discuss the team’s vision for this year’s game, with longtime series creative director Lynell Jinks also popping in to answer some of my technical questions. We cover a wide array of topics, including what goes into making a big decade-spanning WrestleMania Showcase mode, new match types like Ambulance and Gauntlet, the series’ lack of crossplay, the state of PC optimization and whether DLSS or FSR will be supported, and more.
But first, the elephant in the room. In recent days, Vince McMahon was freshly accused of sexual coercion, assault, and trafficking in a bombshell lawsuit that also implicated some other WWE employees/talent. You can read more about it via The Wall Street Journal, although a warning, the details are upsetting. Despite this becoming a major mainstream news story, WWE largely tried to avoid the subject this weekend during the Royal Rumble, while 2K PR would only say they were “focused on WWE 2K24” when I broached the subject. The latter is fair enough as the WWE 2K series is produced largely independently from WWE by Visual Concepts, and from my interaction with the team over the years, they’ve always come across as genuinely enthusiastic fans who just want to make the best wrestling game possible. There are unquestionably going to be further developments in this story, which may affect some people’s ability to enjoy WWE and associated products like the WWE 2K games. That said, for now, we’re going to focus on Visual Concepts’ work and what they’ve been preparing for WWE 2K24.
So, 40 years of WrestleMania. It’s a lot of stuff to cover. How do you pick which matches and moments that you wanted to focus on?
Bryan Williams: 40 years of WrestleMania. Yes, it is a lot to wade through. I mean, 40 years of the biggest event in WWE history. You know, the one good thing is that because there’s so much to pull from, it makes it easy as far as definitely wanting to do this match, but then having to whittle that down into a manageable number of matches is the other [issue]. But there were a couple things that went into this selection — one of them was the fact that ten years ago, in 2014, we did 30 Years of WrestleMania. So this is this is like almost a sequel of sorts to one of our previous [Showcases] that was also received very, very well. And so one of the things that I know the Showcase designer, Dino Zucconi, was very mindful of was not wanting to redo a lot of matches that we did previously, which was good, as having ten years in between gave us that much more wealth of content. But at the same time, there are just some matches in WrestleMania history that are so iconic that, you know, to do a mode without them would be a disservice to the fans and the brand that is WrestleMania.
So that’s part 1, and part 2 is obviously, are we able to get the rights to the wrestlers? That’s another part of it as well. We use that to kind of come up with our list of matches that we think, one, fully encompass and represent the gravitas of what this event is, and two, provides enough matches as far as content to make sure that we’re giving the fans a full meal and not a snack. And I think with this year’s Showcase of the Immortals we’ve achieved just that. And I’m excited for the fans to get their hands on it.
How many matches will be in the Showcase in total?
BW: There are 21 matches from the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, 2010s, up to the 2020s… the current day. So we have a wide selection, every era is represented. I will say one of the cool things about this year for Showcase of the Immortals is that there’s a lot more female representation than there was ten years ago when 2K14 hit the shelves. So very excited and happy about that. In the demo we’re showing at this event today, one of the matches there is Rhea Ripley and Charlotte Flair from WrestleMania 39. So that is one of the matches that players will be able to experience in this year’s Showcase.
One of my nitpicks about Showcase modes in the past, is it wasn’t always clear what you needed to do to accomplish objectives. The exact right combination of moves. But I feel like this year, it was made much more clear. All the buttons you need to press are right up there on the screen…
BW: I’m glad to hear that. Dino, that was something that he was very intent on doing. Trying to, like you said, really let the players know exactly what needs to be done in order for them to accomplish a thing. And they split the objectives this year. They made it so that you’ve got your main objective, which is tied to triggering cutscenes using that Slingshot Technology that we like to brag about, and then you also have sub-objectives. In past games, if you completed one before the other, you would lose the ability to complete some other tasks and would have to redo the match to get all of the unlockables. This year, completing the main objective will have no effect on the sub. You can complete them out of order in a way.
Now, the big question – when are we getting The Streak Showcase?
BW: You’re referring to just an Undertaker, go through all his wins at WrestleMania Showcase?
Yeah.
BW: Man, yeah, we attempted that way back in WWE 2K14 and it became, again speaking to character rights, quickly apparent that we were not going to be able to get access to all of his former victims at WrestleMania. But I definitely love the idea. […] It’d be great if one day, moving forward, if we could get the rights to all of his opponents and do justice to that incredible WrestleMania streak. Yeah, I’d love to be a part of that. And I know the fans would love to participate and play that.
It’s kinda the gold standard…
BW: That is the thing. One day we’ll get there.
Last year, when we talked about WWE 2K23, you touched on all the work that went into creating the War Games match. This year’s matches maybe aren’t quite as complex as War Games, but what went into making, say, the Ambulance or Casket matches?
BW: War Games was something that everybody was proud of from 2K23. It was a massive undertaking, both from a design standpoint, engineering, and animation, and the response that we got from it was overwhelmingly positive. And it gave the team the necessary boost of confidence to say, wow, although it was one match, the work that went into it was probably the work of implementing 3 or 4 matches. And with that confidence in our back pocket, the fans have long informed us of their desire to have Special Guest Referee back. And so that was probably the first thing when we got into pre-production when WWE 2K24 began. And we said, hey, you know, maybe we can go bigger than that even, and let’s consider doing an Ambulance match. We can do War Games, we can do these two. And then we kept talking and discussing, and oh, Casket would be nice as well. And then one of our designers went, hey, I’ve heard rumblings about them wanting a Gauntlet match back. And there were also a couple of other matches that we were going to do in addition, which is incredible. We ended up doing four this year. But it was all boosted by the confidence that we had coming out of 2K23.
And for me, as someone who’s been on the franchise for as long as I have, I like the fact that of the four that we are adding this year, two of them are match types that have been in the franchise previously, Special Guest Referee and Gauntlet, and two are matches that are brand new to the franchise and have never been there before. I think that is a very nice compromise.
Feels like a nice split.
BW: Yeah, a nice split. Obviously we’re not above criticism at all, but sometimes we’ll be critiqued, “Well, all you’re doing is reintroducing something that was in the game previously.” And maybe that’s true, but at the same time, we’re bringing it back bigger and better than it was before. […] And the fact that all of these match types, these new ones are all available in all the other modes – Universe, MyGM, online – I think that also is something that just made the effort all that much more worthwhile. You know, it’s not just an exhibition plaything.
One thing I noticed while playing is the improvement in facial detail and animation. There used to be a pretty wide gap between some of the big names like Randy Orton and some of the lower-profile stars in terms of accuracy, but now everyone in the demo we saw today looked more or less right.
BW: I work with the animation team, but it was Matt Garward who spearheaded that effort and went to great lengths to improve that. So I’m glad you noticed. […] They basically just refactored the whole rigging system for the face get proper facial expressions and to eliminate some of the more wonky or somewhat comical facial expressions that could pop up here and there. So, yeah, and that’s across the board, cutscenes, entrances, end game, facial animations all got touched up.
I also saw a little bit of blood during a couple of matches. And facial bruising. Was there a conscious effort to ratchet the violence up a bit?
BW: The blood is something that also got updated. We improved some of the decals of the bleeding on the face and I’m not sure if you saw it today, but the blood will actually drip on the mat. This is something that we had in older generations of the franchise and is another one of those little things that fans have wanted back for several years now. So yeah, the blood will stain the mat, it will stain the floor at the ringside, and it will smear a little bit.
Another new mechanic this year are Super Finishers, and I noticed that Kevin Owens’ Super is the Package Piledriver, which is a no-no in the WWE. Is that kind of the idea with Super Finishers? The forbidden moves you wouldn’t usually see in WWE?
BW: No, no. I guess in the case of Owens — I set the Supers — and I tried to give as many to the characters as possible where it made sense, and yeah, Kevin Owens does not hit the package piledriver in the WWE, but it was a nod. I assigned it to him as a super as a nod to his independent days when that was his primary finish. But you’ve got guys like Randy Orton, who has two. Randy’s a good example where he has the RKO, which is deadly on its own, but he also has an avalanche RKO, where he performs it off the top rope. He also has the punt to the head that he used to do. And I thought, he rarely uses that maneuver now, but when he does, it usually means that the person on the receiving end is out for a couple of weeks. So I set that as his Super also. The way it works is if a character has a Super Finisher assigned they have to build up and store three finisher stock and then the HUD will start to electrify and that’s when they get access to the Super.
You’ve seen that escalation in actual wrestling in recent years – more and more finishers being used and kicked out of – so I like the idea of adding some heavier firepower to the game.
BW: We really wanted to emphasize the “Super” in the name. So not only is it the most powerful move that you can perform in any match, but it also will temporarily nullify the Resiliency Payback. So even if you have Resiliency and you get hit with [a Super], you will not be able to rely on it to instantly kick out. I think the debuff lasts for approximately 20 seconds, so if you hit the Super and go for the cover right away, it’s going to be a wrap unless the defender is really, really good at kicking out. And players can go into their custom moveset and they can freely remove a super finisher or assign as many as four.
That feels like more finishers than you could assign in the past…
BW: Yeah, we expanded the move slots. In 2K23 and before, every character only had two signature slots and two finisher slots. We’ve expanded that to five in-ring signatures and in-ring finishers each. Not every superstar has five; some have four, some have three signatures and four finishers, but we wanted to expand the capacity to account for the ability of players to perform perhaps their standard finisher from multiple situations. Shinsuke Nakamura is a good example. His finisher, the Kinshasa, we have four versions of that one. Two perform from standing, one from a grounded situation, and one as a middle rope dive. So, in previous games we had to pick and choose which versions of these moves are we going to assign by default as the finisher. But now, with the expanded slots, we can give him all the versions of his finisher and players will be able to hit it from various angles.
That’s a nice change. In the past, with some wrestlers you had to set up their finisher in a very specific way, which made them harder to play as.
BW: Exactly, exactly.
This year, you added a new “trading blows” minigame, which I enjoyed, but it seems like over the past couple of years the focus has been on reducing the minigames or at least simplifying them. Why did you decide to include a more complicated minigame again?
BW: Did you find it complicated?
Initially. I figured it out after a couple of tries, but I didn’t quite get it the first time.
BW: Yeah. Because it’s different. Because it’s like the only minigame where you have to press and hold. Yeah, yeah. On the design side, we were cognizant of that fact. We figured it might take the user once or twice to get a grasp on how the minigame works, but we felt confident that after 1 or 2 times, people would kind of pick up on how it functions.
Maybe complicated was the wrong word. It just seems to be a slight departure from the WWE 2K design philosophy from the past couple of years.
BW: For me, the things I get excited about are the things we see regularly on television. So, I’m glad that we were finally able to introduce trading blows into the game. I’ve long wanted this in the game. […] I hope the fans will be excited for it to enjoy the mechanic. But it’s also one of those things where we didn’t want to overexpose it.
The [trading blows] minigame can only be used once in a match, and it can be triggered one of two ways. You can trigger it manually by holding the light attack and that’ll automatically go into the trading blows sequence. If you don’t want to enable it manually on your own, just through playing the course of a match, it will trigger off of a reversal and it will trigger off of a kick out. So if you’re in a match and you pin your opponent and they kick out with that dramatic nearfall, it’ll transition into the trading blows game. And the whole point of the Trading Blows minigame is the winner gets some finisher and special added to their meter. And the opponent, the loser on the receiving end, is stunned. So, it’s implemented as a way to hopefully kind of funnel someone to a victory.
I can definitely see it changing the flow of matches…
BW: Yeah. And it can be toggled on and off. If someone doesn’t want it on at all, they can turn it off. Or if they want it to trigger only manually, they can set that, or only automatically. So there are options there.
I’m not sure how much you can tell me about the roster at this point, but any hints?
BW: So, we’re going to do our big roster reveal at a later date. The full roster will be released soon. And I think fans will be excited. They’ll be excited for the additions to just the current roster as well as the folks that will show up and that we needed for Showcase. Because we are covering such a wide number of years, we’ll have guys that are making their return to the game and we’ll have a lot of new faces that are making their franchise debut. So, some really cool names for sure. I’m excited.
I think I might get a similar answer, but is there anything you can say about DLC?
BW: [Laughs] All I can say is that it’s looking great.
Will crossplay be in this year?
BW: No, it will not. I know that’s something that fans would be excited about. And it’s something we’re keen to do as well, but not for this year.
What is potentially being done to optimize the game for PC this year? Will DLSS, FSR, and other upsampling tech be supported?
Lynell Jinks: Unfortunately, no. For PC… our main SKU are the consoles. So, the next-gen consoles, supporting those are what we look to first and foremost. Anything with PC, we’re trying to support whatever features are on the high-end consoles, but we are also limited by the fact that we still support the older consoles.
Okay. But like last year, can you still make the PC game look as good as the next-generation consoles with a powerful enough rig?
LJ: Yes.
So, out of everything you’ve added to 2K24, what are you most proud of? What is the thing you’d tell somebody to check out first?
BW: That’s a good question. And a hard one to answer. And I’m trying my best not to give the simple answer of “Oh, everything!” I think one thing that is going to generate excitement is the return of throwable weapons.
I didn’t even notice you could throw weapons!
BW: [Laughs]. Well, I’m glad I informed you. Yeah, we brought back the ability to throw weapons. Uh, this was something that we had way back in the franchise back in 2011, and we reintroduced it this year. And it’s just fun. It totally changes the dynamic of a match where weapons are legal. You can throw everything aside from, I believe, the championships.
That would be disrespectful to the belt.
BW: [Laughs]. Yeah, exactly. But we had to do a whole bunch of new weapons as well. Like the microphone, guitars, we’ve added so many new weapons to the game. Zelina Vega, who’s also in the demo build, her chancla slipper is a throwable weapon. Just the excitement and the fun that I’ve seen from the influencers and the press today, playing in a backstage environment, has been fun to watch. So I’m proud that throwable weapons made a return.
We just did a lot of small quality of life improvements to the game to try to help balance certain elements of the game. We’ve expanded some moves as well, like the corner position, the running corner attack position. We added two new move slots for it. We completely revamped fighting on top of the announce table. […] So, I’m just proud of — see, I’m doing it — I’m proud of the game overall. People enjoyed 2K23 and I just think that what we’ve done this year with WWE 2K24 is just a huge step up from even that. I think we’ve got a special one on our hands, I really do.
LJ: I think people will be happy. The amount of content that we offer in every single mode, from MyRise, to MyFaction, to Showcase, there’s so much that we’re trying to cross-pollinate in each mode. Things that are unlocked in Showcase can now be brought into certain other modes. Same with MyGM. We want to drive people to play all of the different modes, because we’ve put so much effort into making sure these experiences are amazing for our users. And I felt in previous years we weren’t really doing a good job of driving people toward other modes, and I think that we’re trying to address that this year. I feel like we have something for everyone if they try it.
Well, I look forward to diving in deeper. Thanks for your time!
LJ: Yeah, of course!
BW: It’s always a pleasure. It’s always a pleasure.
WWE 2K24 launches on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, and PS5 on March 8.
