In the wise words of Winnie the Pooh, "oh bother." Another trailer for WWE 2K22 has leaked ahead of an official announcement and fans are finding that the glitchy ghost of WWE 2K20 hasn't been exorcised by developer Visual Concepts.
WWE 2K20 was notorious for its shocking number of technical and visual inconsistencies which was a shame as it was the first entry in the series to be developed solely by Visual Concepts. The studio had helped out on every WWE 2K game since 2K14, and this should have been its shining debut, and instead the game was ridiculed and sank to the depths of Metacritic in 2019.
To contain this car crash, 2K Games elected to cancel WWE 2K21 and release WWE 2K Battlegrounds, an arcade-style mashup of the WWE 2K experience. It received middling reviews and it started to look like this kaleidoscopic cartoony game was going to be the swan song of the series that had spanned 20 years.
Here's the first trailer for WWE 2K22 - featuring Roman Reigns, Finn Balor, Bobby Lashley, and Drew McIntyre!
Fortunately, that wasn't the case. WWE 2K22 was revealed in the spring of last year, boasting
a "redesigned engine, new MyGM and MyFACTION modes, new controls, upgraded visuals, and more" on the way in March. 2K Games gave us a trailer just over a week ago showing off "behind the scenes" on the development of the game, with John Cena, The Undertaker and Machine Gun Kelly all appearing to gush about WWE 2K22. However, this new leaked trailer centres on Royal Rumble and fans have actually spotted a couple of glitches that have wormed their way into the gameplay. This is the new trailer below:
Admittedly, it's blink-and-you'll-miss-it stuff, but it proves that WWE 2K22 has an astronomically high bar to clear with its community of players if they're willing to scrub through the trailer with a fine-toothed comb. Specifically speaking, Asuka Langley's mask looks like it's trying to escape her hand at the 0:27 mark; the pole jitters out of their hands at the 1:10 mark; you can see the table jittering at the 1:21 mark.
No game is ever going to be without glitches, that's a given, and the things that we've seen in the trailer are very small. Be that as it may, you can understand why players are cautious about being too excited for WWE 2K22 as there is a reputation to uphold. The silver lining is that if this trailer was intended to be released last week, it might offer the team at Visual Concepts to pull together a less glitchy gameplay trailer.
Featured Image Credit: 2K Games, DisneyTopics: 2K Games