2K finally drops a decent trailer for WWE 2K22 – it looks like a great ‘date night’ game

I’m pretty excited for the upcoming WWE 2K22 game and for good reason: there wasn’t a WWE 2K21.

The last game in the franchise was WWE 2K20. It was so poorly received that Visual Concepts and 2K decided to take a year off and reassess things.

It wasn’t that bad

Realistically, 2K20 was a good game but it did feel rushed. And if a game whose development started before the pandemic ended up half-baked then its immediate follow-up was likely to fare far worse after lockdown.

Like many other games, WWE 2K22 has been pushed back to the tail end of Q1 2022. And I wouldn’t be shocked if March became June and June became October.

Still, the trailer looks fantastic:

We can see some clear graphics updates, what appears to be a fantastic new character customization screen, and a complete UI overhaul.

Most intriguing, however, are the features for “My” modes. For those who don’t play modern annual-release sports games, they’re pretty much just big nerdy role-playing games.

You create a character, go off adventuring, experience thrills, drama, and deep storylines, gain experience, and level up.

In WWE 2K22, it looks like we’ll have a “My Rise” mode, a “My GM” mode, and a “My Stable” mode. I’m particularly interested in the latter because I’m constantly looking for new ways to play games together with my wife.

Games to play on date night

We love to play together but we’re not the slightest bit competitive so versus modes don’t appeal to us. It can be fun to take turns and, because I’m an RPG nerd, I’m already imagining a stable of six to eight wrestlers split between the two of us made up of wacky WWE-meets-Love is a Fetish characters.

The WWE 2K series has done a pretty good job with women characters in the past. In fact, 2K20 featured a male/female wrestler duo as the playable protagonists in its story-driven career mode and had a heavy emphasis on women superstars in other game modes.

It’s probably too much to hope that the game will have gender-neutral or non-binary options so everyone can see themselves represented, but I won’t stop asking for it.

At any rate, the game’s looking great and I’m predicting it’ll be a date night hit once it releases next year.

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