WWE 2K25 IS A WONDERFUL MESS, PERFECTLY REPRESENTING ITS SOURCE

by JAM WALKER

II play the WWE 2K games annually. Typically only for the few months following their release, but every year regardless, (and for full disclosure, for the past few years it’s been via review codes supplied by the publisher, 2K Games).

I mostly consider myself done with them once I’ve finished off the Showcase and MyRise single-player campaigns. A funny thing happened this year though; I got really into WWE 2K25’s MyFaction online gacha mode after years of basically ignoring it.

Not getting into it to the degree that I spent money on virtual card packs or anything, but to the degree that for months now I’ve been booting up the game on my Steam Deck every single day just for the log-in rewards anyway.

WWE 2K25 is currently six months down the road from its initial release, and it’s become abundantly clear that it’s a game and a franchise in increasing distress.

Every year we get a new entry in the WWE 2K franchise; (well, except for 2021, but that was a whole thing). In addition to the obvious roster updates there tends to come some core gameplay tweaks, a new match mode, and either a whole new game mode or the revamping of an existing one.

The problem now is that a new WWE 2K is such an unwieldy hydra of largely disparate modes and features with a playerbase so vocally enmeshed in which ones they’re interested in, (and often at the utter expense of the ones they aren’t), that the developers at Visual Concepts have no real way to make a meaningful impact across it all on an annual release cycle.

WWE 2K25’s biggest feature addition was The Island; an adaptation of sister franchise NBA 2K’s widely loathed The City. An always-online hub that allows 2K to constantly shovel advertisements and microtransaction opportunities in front of the player’s face; where you either grind like crazy to unlock cosmetics as well as wrestlers themselves, or can just spend a few bucks here and there to lessen the timesink.

It’s a miserable thing that represents the worst of modern AAA games publisher bullshit and WWE 2K fans had long dreaded the inevitability of it.

Like most of the WWE 2K audience, I also completely get why it exists and am only surprised that it didn’t come along sooner.

Well not only, I’m also surprised they left it out of the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC releases of the game. Unfortunately doing so means players there can’t access the recently released Goldberg and Nikki Bella characters, nor can they experience the Wyatt Sicks storyline which features never before seen content of Bray Wyatt recorded before he tragically passed a couple of years ago.

The problem isn’t The Island itself per-se, as virulently feculent as it is, it’s in the demonstrable inability 2K Games has shown over the last six months to meaningfully support it alongside their other live-service mode, MyFaction. 

MyFaction’s ‘World Tour’ campaign rather hilariously has still not left the United States despite teasing a jaunt to Japan since it launched. Given how long it’s been since the mode has seen a significant update this year, any expectations that it’ll get there at this point seem laughable.

On top of twin live-services, the Visual Concepts team are also tasked with maintaining their season pass DLC schedule, implementing patches which frequently do little more than attempt to fix things the prior patch catastrophically broke, and all while the bulk of the development team is presumably busy working on next year’s inevitable WWE 2K26.

2K Games has also shown frustratingly little interest in opening up either of their live-service modes to being a console-agnostic ecosystem in their own right, as cross-progression is currently only supported within consoles of the Xbox and PlayStation families respectively.

I don’t know what the reasonable solution is here. 

Should 2K Games simply throw more dev talent at the problem? Probably, but that’s unfortunately at-odds with the utter leanness every publisher is trying to operate on nowadays, and the fact that 2K have already hit the various Visual Concepts teams with two rounds of layoffs within the past two years should be a pretty clear sign that this won’t happen. 

Should the series simply switch to being bi-yearly? That would seemingly create a situation where each new entry could sport more meaningful new features but is completely counter to the financial and contractual realities of a licensed ‘sports’ game such as this, so it’s deeply unlikely.

Look, I love these games, and I’m genuinely in awe of how broadly well-made and feature packed they are each year under such a tight turnaround. I’m just bummed to see serious cracks start to form in their foundations in the name of pursuing the almighty live-service dollar.

With the rapidly increasing ticket and merchandise prices WWE are demanding under their new ownership at TKO though, it is morbidly funny to witness the 2K series emulate its source material so deeply on a meta-level in its dogged pursuance of whales and the rich.

It’s horrible, but funny.

Maybe that’s it though. Maybe WWE 2K25 is exactly what it should be; a perfectly holistic representation of the bloated, profits-obsessed but constantly rake-stepping ‘sports entertainment’ company it depicts.

Maybe we were fools to hope it could be anything better.