Prior to the release of WWE 2K23 on 14th March 2023, we had the opportunity to attend a deep dive session with Visual Concepts, the developers of the game. In this session, we went through some of the feature which that will be available in the game.

DLC

In WWE 2K23, the game’s DLC will include new characters into the game’s ever growing roster. Some of the DLC characters will include past Hall of Famers, current stars on the main roster and the NXT; which includes a lot of firsts for this franchise like Rick Steiner, “The King” Harley Race, and Zeus, are all making their franchise debut this year.

Visual Concepts mentioned that they spare no expenses when developing WWE 2K23. The team used MoCap to gather and collect all of the moves, taunts, reversals and counter animations to make sure that everyone’s moves, signatures and finishers were kept faithful and be well represented in the game.

MyGM

MyGM is coming back and is stronger than ever. WWE 2K23 will be adding in new GMs such as Mick Foley, Eric Bischoff, Tyler Breeze, and Xavier Woods; with each of them having their own special power cards. WWE 2K23 will also be adding in new brands like the NXT 2.0 and WCW along with their associated power cards.

WWE 2K23 will also see new match types being included into the game such as the Steel Cage matches. The team are adding what is essentially an Endless mode where players can play as long as they want. This mode features seasons, and for each end of the season, players can keep some people on your roster and go back to the draft.

The goal for that mode is to enter the Hall of Fame, and players can earn trophies along the way. Once you get enough trophies, you can retire and go to the Hall of Fame, or you can just keep playing.

Creation Suite

The big emphasis for the team on the Creation Suite this time is the Superstars and looking at the thousands creations that were made every single year. The team mentioned one sore spot for them was the huge gap between the creations and the fidelity that was put into the WWE Superstars models.

The team mentioned that they were able to close that gap this year by having scanning over 16 different ethnicity of real people; while still having the same functionality to change and sculpt the base settings on the character’s head, but also increasing the fidelity on the high-res textures. This step was made to ensure that the player’s creation looks as good as the WWE Superstars.

One of the big things in professional wrestling is the performance that the matches bring. The team is allowing the community to take the entrances from Superstars and with the advanced creation tools to customise their own creations. The creation suite for WWE 2K23 will also provide players to customise and create an arena by adding tons of props, stage parts and also templates.

MyRise

Visual Concepts mentions that they listened to the fans and kept what the community liked about the previous entry’s MyRise format. The team also brought back some of the things fans might’ve missed from the earlier iterations of MyCareer by introducing storylines that are unique from each other. The team also gives players a lot of choices along the way while still having a clear beginning, middle, and end to give players a sense of conclusion.

The two stories in WWE 2K23 are “The Legacy” and “The Law”, where both focuses on how the players debut in WWE, and how that affects your journey as a Superstar. In “The Legacy” players debut as a second generation Superstar where they have to deal with both the pros and cons of coming in when people already know the name of your famous relative.

Whereas with “The Law”, players come in as an indie athlete who’s built a reputation outside the company on your own entirely but still having that WWE hype factor behind you, and what happens when you have that sort of pressure.

Players can choose a lot of choices in both stories which can affect where you end up. Visual Concepts made sure that they brought those big WWE style cutscenes where fans can only see on their programme, which by extension the things can only see in this game.

Additionally, a big feature that the team mentioned is that players can export their characters, which was a feature that players couldn’t do in WWE 2K22. Players can export their characters that they create into play mode and the rest of the game.

MyFaction

One of the additions to MyFaction in WWE 2K23 is Quick Play where players can bring their factions and comepete online. There’s also going to be new Premium Live Events for players to earn cool things. There’s also going to be a new card rarity being the Pink Diamond card which is currently the highest tier card.

Universe

The Universe is essentially a sandbox where players can create any show, graphics, and roster that they want. Visual Concepts added some new stuff where as your Superstar wins matches, they’ll get a momentum which can be used to add rivalry actions to a particular match. Players can decide how they want the match to play out. An example being players can have two Superstars have a respectful rivalry where they would shake hands before a match starts.

When players reach the Premium Live Events, they can cash that momentum in and use it to boost the rankings of your Superstar.

Q&A

At the end of the deep dive session, we sat down with the Visual Concepts (VC) team where we asked a few questions about WWE 2K23:

With John Cena being featured at the helm for WWE 2k23, how was the experience like to sit down and hear through his entire WWE career and implement that into WWE 2K23’s 2K Showcase?

VC: We’ve been a huge fan of John Cena ever since the start of his career. It was really fun to watch John Cena, who was just a guy chasing this dream, and it was cool to highlight his career. We’ve done a previous showcase of him back in 2K15 which was more rivalry base. So this allowed us to go from the start of his WWE run, until his Summerslam match with Roman Reigns.

Being able to sit down with him and go over what we wanted to talk about for each match was insightful because he got to tell us stuff that we didn’t even know about. John Cena even gave us some very detailed thoughts on some of the matchups that he had throughout his career when facing off against his opponents.

One of the selling points for WWE 2K23 is 2K’s Slingshot Tech. Were there any challenges that the team had faced when implementing this feature that allowed for seamless transitions from gameplay to live-action footage?

VC: Yes. It’s usually the challenge of matching up and getting the frames right from the cutscene to the video and back. We wanted to make sure that the cameras are about the same range so that the models don’t jump and become much bigger or smaller on the fade.

We think overall, we implemented the Slingshot Tech for the first time last year, and on the first run we’ve basically nailed it, and it was just minor tweaks from there. We had some new people joining in the team and they had to learn it from scratch. But it’s something that once you get it down, all you can do is make it better each time.

The Slingshot Tech presents new challenges every time we do it. When we looked at some real life match venues, we had to make sure the lighting and construction were right, compared to a regular WWE broadcast. We had to figure out things to make it look older, and make it look different when we’re transitioning back and forth between video and gameplay.

It creates a ton of new problems for us every match that we tried this one, and we always have to take that into account. But that’s what keep us honest, and it pushes us.

A big feature coming into this series this year is Wargames , which is very popular among fans. There will be a lot of things going on in these matches, how hard is it to get this match type into the game?

VC: Wargames was one of those things that we’ve been eyeing to put into the game for years. Any given year it just looked way too big of a bite for us to take, as far as needing to finish the game within a year. We realised last year that we needed to start some things and build some foundation to even give us a chance of doing it the following year.

With 2K23, this was the very first thing we started on and our engineers were able to get a working version in the game pretty quickly. We had to pull together the arena team, the entrance team, the props team, the audio team, everything that had something unique about Wargames that needed to be done that we’ve never done before be put together. It’s probably the biggest example of a team effort that we’ve seen on a project.

WWE 2K23 is set to be released on 14th March 2023 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox one, Xbox Series X|S and PC.