Yuke’s gets future endeavored from WWE games
By Scott Keith on 7 August 2019
2K announced yesterday that Yuke's will no longer be developing WWE games and will be handled in-house by Visual Concepts (the NBA 2K squad). After twenty years of making WWE games for PlayStation (and four of the GameCube games: X8, XIX, and the Day of Reckoning series), did you have any fond memories of their entries?
I'll always love Here Comes the Pain's awesome blend of arcade fast gameplay with sim-style differential between the top guys and the rest of the roster, the addictive GM and Story modes of SmackDown vs Raw 06-07, the fun Showcase modes in recent games that acted as playable WWE documentaries (a cool sendoff for them by having this year's Showcase center around the Horsewomen), and of course, the endless Light Heavyweight battles between Dean Malenko and Scotty 2 Hotty in the Know Your Role season mode. It was probably time for a change after how stale the last several games were (and Yuke's brass going on the record a few months ago with their frustration by demands from 2K and WWE), but it will still be weird to see WWE games without their handiwork, the good and bad of it.
I was never a fan of the Yukes line overall, although obviously they had some great stuff early on. I've found the past few years to be very rinse-repeat, and in particular I don't find the controls and timing to be particularly intuitive and they've never really fixed it to where I can pick it up and have fun playing. I wish they would have spun off more stuff like the All Stars or Legends of Wrestlemania games.
Still hoping we get the rumored AEW-AKI team-up, though.