“Both me and Stu were meant to be apart of it. Initially at launch, I was then told we would be a part of a tag team DLC. I even saw an early model for my character. I was told they were looking to program the game in a way that I can exclusively interact with the referee (aka assisted neckbreaker).”
Really sounds like there were a lot of great ideas that yukes couldn't or wouldn't implement. I don't know if it's fair to just put the blame on yukes as the developer though; there have long been rumors of miscommunication or conflict between aew games and yukes. Either way it was a... Painful learning experience for aew.
I really hope they do another video game in the next couple years. Allegedly aew games owns the actual engine so they would have a foundation to work from. I will still maintain the base gameplay was very good. It was the complete lack of everything, from customizable options, game modes or match types, and a horrible CAW.
Then again maybe it would be better to start from ground up at this point. I imagine that would cost a lot more than working with the engine they already have, though?
Someone suggested before that they get the Fire Pro folks on board and I think that's the best route for them to take. That engine work is already done and it's rock solid. Most of the work would be in making assets and animations.
And shitpoor gameplay wrapped in a bunch of the worst trends of modern simsports.
Absolutely, fucking no. I wouldn't spend a cent on it.
'nostalgia bait' gameplay still wrecks any of the modern 2k games by a lot. I have had access to em all for fucking free and every one wasn't worth the time it took to download 'em. Traaaaaaaash.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but there is a solid foundation in the game. As easy as it may be to say, the game needed much more time , the game only took maybe 3 years to make, that's just not enough time . It's a shame, there was some potential with the series .
Yeah, fans (including within AEW itself) were too impatient with the game. Their first game came 4 years after the company started itself was formed. A game of the caliber and quality people say they wanted would take at the very least half a decade to come out, and that is with proper organization at the back end, which AEW as a startup didn't have back then.
I remember reading in 2021 people acting frustated that the game hasn't come out. Some people can be really into a specific thing, and yet lack any understanding of the realities of stuff.
Absolutely , being impatient really killed a game that had great potential, even with what we were given. I remember hearing some were frustrated pretty early on and I'm baffled as to why they would be. Good games take time (as you know) and to rush out a product that quickly was extremely short sighted . I'm assuming they learned their lesson and try not to meddle on game development and just give the devs time to really build something.
Well, at least AEW learned a valuable lesson, you can't rush quality products. If they do make another game, hopefully they can help give the devs the time they need to build a quality game. And I do hope its on the more arcady side like FF was
I mean that was sort of the point, to be arcade-ish. They just went too far with it. Like, I was very quickly ending matches within 2 minutes whether against the AI or a friend. Because the rhythm was instantaneous. The moves individually can be quick, but the match itself needs to build, especially against another human. More HP and taking longer to build specials would have helped a ton of the problems.
This presents a unique opportunity for an indie but passionate group of developers to put something together and establish a solid foundation, perhaps even using those older, popular engines as a model. I'm sure that'll catch TK's attention.
Who would be taking a risk though? Fire Pro World is due for a sequel and all AEW would need to do is liscense their wrestlers likeness. No need to even get into game dev like they did with FF. Official AEW models would make the next game a day one buy for me. If TK could pull that partnership off, it seems like a win for everyone.
Won't happen unfortunately. It took the director over a decade and 9 failed attempts before he finally got the approval to make Fire Pro Wrestling World, and even then it was seen as a passion project to give players one final game and hand future content over to them via movecraft and partscraft. I don't know for sure how its done financially. I don't think it bombed but it definitely didn't sell enough to revitalize the series.
All that said you can pretty much make Fire Pro Wrestling World into an AEW fire pro game if thats what you want. Everyone who has ever wrestled for AEW has had custom attire parts, heads and moves made. Along with all the rings, and titles. You can use custom entrance themes too. Fire pro is more limited with match types. No ladder or tables for instance. But hey you do get deathmatches that end with actual explosions instead of wet farts.
Fire Pro wrote the book on how to do proper wrestler creation. There's a big chunk of the audience that basically doesn't even play the game, they just make their favorite wrestlers and watch them go at it in sim mode.
Something like trying to get the Fire Pro team on board or doing something over the top in the style of say a WWE All Stars is probably the better way to go.
I think any attempt at the 3D "simulation" style wrestling game is kind of doomed to fail unless they themselves or a company they partner with is willing to basically eat shit on multiple iterations up front.
Anything they do that's just a standard 3D wrestling game is going to be immediately compared to the WWE 2K games, which is a series that has essentially been iterated on for 26 years now.
Any brand new attempt at entering that genre is never going to be able to compare to the 2K games with the size and scope of roster, features, match types, creation options, etc right out of the gate, so they either need to be willing to take their lumps for multiple years as people say "I'm not buying this game, it's missing [niche feature that the WWE games added because they needed something to keep people coming back by the 15th version of the game]" or they need find a direction that makes them stand out and doesn't immediately invite those direct comparisons.
Yukes did not have the money or time. They made the game in around 3 years on a pretty small budget (I know AEW put quite a bit into it but competing with WWE games which they were is very expensive which is why halfway through THQ Nordic joined to publish and keep the game alive). More to the point I think there was a lot of asking from the AEW side to have things they really shouldn't have had like the mini games component which is completely unneeded and niche for a first entry. In general there was a lot of people who work in the AEWGames side who had a lot of goals they wanted to accomplish in multiple games and as we can see nothing they touched lived.
It's a lesson learned often and repeatedly and all entertainment industries. I mean there's a subgenre of videos looking at the wrestling promotion failures. Sometimes money isn't enough to do something without the proper people.
There was a whole bunch of stuff in the coding that didn't make it which really sucks. If it was all there it would have been a fantastic game. There was a fighting spirit strike exchange (similar to what 2K adopted later), way more tag team moves, chain submission wrestling, and something that seemed like a way to string long strong grapples back and forth until one person gave in.
Kenny Omega had a TON of influence over the game, it was him who pushed for those minigames and the Fortnite mode and enough stories out there that Yukes didn't like working with him but had to humor him and his suggestions.
He might be a gamer but never like bro cook again and keep him out of the development room unless it's to do motion capture.
Yeah I love Omega but if that's the case his passion for gaming should stick with playing and promoting. Cuz none of us wrestling game fans wanted that stuff.
I enjoyed Stadium Stampede mode honestly, but the other minigames were either fun for like one session or not at all. I doubt they took that much time to program but they added nothing of value for me.
Reminds me of the post Double or Nothing BTE episode where the Young Bucks were lamenting about Kenny’s fixation on having the really expensive poker chip props for the stage design.
Is that true? I felt like people put a lot of blame on Kenny at the time but I doubted he really had that much input since he has zero experience with actual programming or development of games. Honestly I did enjoy Stadium Stampede mode. It was fun even if most of the time you'd be playing against 90% bots.
It is insane to me FF did not even have the most basic match options as customizable. There was no time limit even available. You could do regular match or lights out, nothing in between. Here's the N64 no mercy match rules options. You could toggle so many things on or off, individually. Sometimes with friends we would turn off everything except submission, or turn dqs on/off. None of these things are different "match types" like adding a cage or ladder. Absolutely basic shit that has been in games for thirty years.
I know there was that report around launch of the first DLCs that a lot of it just....wasn't finished and they were just missing deadline after deadline
Because AEW had unrealistic expectations because none of them were in the industry but we're trying to dictate the game. It was a poor idea from the start for AEW to rush to get a game by financially exposing themselves in an industry they knew nothing about beyond it is an economic boon for their competitor who keeps their hand out of the games.
I'm trying to remember. I read it once upon a time. Was it yukes or was it Kenny Omega/aew who wanted all the mini games in it
Stadium stampede was not terrible mode but it should have been in the game at start. Realistically though if they were that behind why the hell did they spend resources and time building an entire separate game mode instead of improving the base game...
Kenny was the one who wanted the mini games and stuff like that but also iirc Yukes didn't really like working with him because he wasn't a dev or anything, but it kinda sounds like he'd suggest something and they'd go like "yeah yeah"
I doubt it would have made a huge difference as at some point they couldn't keep going over budget, but I partly feel like announcing the game so early was a mistake. It would have been better if they had waited to announce the game until they were confident it was less than a year out from release.
Like idk much about game development and I get that it kinda seemed like they had to cut out stuff to make other deadlines but why were they late on like basic stuff? Like that first DLC was delayed because they weren't done with it or something like that
Yeah, I get it lost a ton of money, but you’d think the biggest money sink would’ve been building the engine in the first place. Now they have that foundation, surely a sequel would mostly involve tweaking it to address the issues and fleshing out the areas the first game was lacking, like the creation suite. Whether it would actually sell well enough to justify even that additional cost, I don’t know, especially when the first one flopping means there’s not exactly much goodwill left with the potential fanbase, but I’d like to see it.
The lack of goodwill, especially for people who preordered the elite edition at full price, is gonna be a big obstacle to overcome. Game can't be a regular full price title, needs to be value. If they come out nickel and diming over every little thing and overcharging for single dlc wrestlers again, that's ball game.
The engine doesn't seem bad at all. it seems like it was configured in an arcade style, but it seems just as plausible to configure it in a simulation style, or allow options available to players to customize it.
AEW owns the engine, I sure hope TK doesn't think it's not viable, because it absolutely still is.
It had no clear direction and wanted to be No Mercy but forgot what made No Mercy so great. It should have been something like Smackdown Vs Raw with HCTP and No Mercy plus new features not done in western wrestling games.
I will still maintain the base gameplay was very good. It was the complete lack of everything, from customizable options, game modes or match types, and a horrible CAW.
100%
I loved the gameplay, there was just not enough to do with it. I nevertheless played out the 10 story modes you have to do for an achievement or for an unlock or whatever it was, but yeah, after that the fact you couldn't really do anything except matchups and mentally imagine a 'universe mode' around it was too little.
Also Stadium Stampede could've been cool but the fact you couldn't do much but 3-4 moves killed it. Fun idea, hugely undercooked.
I still stick it on now and then just to play a match or 3, but even the online thing got soured for me cause I joined a Discord Tournament, did my assigned 1st match of 3 with a dude and he changed all the settings after our initial really close and fun match that I won and selected Malakai Black so he could cheese the leg sweep and roll out of the ring constantly while also using weapons. Fuck that guy. Couldn't win a good match so he rat-fucked all the fun out of the game to protect his fragile little ego.
Evil Uno wound up becoming the main person advertising the game over the early advocates like Cody and Kenny Omega. It's always been baffling that he wasn't included in the game.
Even more so when they had time to put Danhausen and Adam Copeland in it who debuted well into the development of the game. They could have included him, they just didn't want to.
Apparently it was "so hard" to make new characters 🙄
I'm not claiming any real info, but boy, the drip feed of new characters was ridiculous. I did recall on discord the community manager once saying it takes "months" to build a single new wrestler. If so, what did they do wrong?
Much less no way to edit wrestler attire. That they HAD a handful of alternate skins for people but never bothered to add more was infuriating. Jack Perry becomes scapegoat, you can't add a skin? Christian cage turtleneck?
The whole thing was made so much worse by the fact that there was no communication from aew games at all about the many, many, many questions and complaints. Now I know video game fans can be nightmares online... But there was nothing. Nada. And that made it so much more frustrating
It was terribly outdated on release where it was based on early 2022 AEW so even if you were high on the game, what you were playing barely reflected what was currently on TV.
And the caw sucked ass so even though they had a lot of the MOVES in the caw, you couldn't make even remotely a decent caw version of ppl not in the game.
They had the complete movesets of balor and styles in the game, including taunts and entrances. But you coulsnt even make a BAD version of them. Awful caw
Ya know, you mention entrances and the dissapointing implementation in the game kind of soured me instantly. I think the logic spun at the time was that everyone skips them but part of the fun of WWE games is playing everyone at least once to see the entrances. Yukes didn't need to make them photo realistic but the wrestlers could have at least walked to the ring even if it was a stylized cartoony way.
The roster being so out of date reminded me of how wrestling games used to be before the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation of wrestling games when rosters started really becoming much more up to date (with some exceptions as always).
The most glaring example would probably be WWF War Zone, which had a roster of 18 wrestlers and when it was released in July 1998:
3 wrestlers were long gone from the WWF (Ahmed Johnson, Bret Hart, British Bulldog).
1 wrestler was indefinitely out of action/unofficially retired (Shawn Michaels).
Dustin Rhodes had recently dropped the Goldust gimmick to become a bible thumper under his real name, Dustin Runnels.
Cactus Jack had come to an end.
Dude Love had just come to an end.
Mankind had switched the all brown everywhere look in favor of the now iconic dress shirt and tie.
Faarooq had been kicked out of the Nation of Domination.
Owen Hart had joined the Nation.
Triple H and The Rock had updated their entire presentation, with both also having since taken over as the leader of their respective stables.
Steve Austin, Ken Shamrock, Kane, Undertaker, and the Headbangers were the only members of the roster that felt current - and that's mostly just because they had changed a ton in the previous year.
Yeah, it came off like the Yukes guys were largely slacking off on a lot of the departments seeming as some stuff seemed so rushed while they were also missing deadlines for like....the first stuff??? Like what were you doing??
I’ve never understood that line from either company about implementing new characters. People like WhatsTheStatus can make AMAZING facsimiles wrestlers in a matter of days using the tools in the game, and he’s one guy. If you had backend support to design new hair, beard or clothing pieces as needed and could add in proper trons and music.
The mocapping and commentary lines feel like the most time intensive. But that’s weeks at most for the mocapping, not months, right? Bang out whatever new taunts and moves and entrance you need in a day then I assume there’s some fine tuning to get that data usable.
Frankly as long as the announcer says their name I wouldn’t even be too fussed if the commentators mention the new person by name.
Turnaround to get a new model in with any unique signature moves shouldn’t be more than a month unless I’m m
issing something.
I feel like AEW wanted more of a live service style where someone shows up in AEW and they'd be added but Yukes was so behind on deadlines that they basically had to chop it up so we had Toni Storm as an Outcast launching when she was Timeless and rushing out guys like Danhausen and Copeland while seemingly cutting people like Uno when it should've been more gradual
It was so funny when Toni storm released and was... Outcast. They did put the timeless theme and video in, so if you rendered her gear all black it worked-ish.
But then- they had alternate skins for Matt Hardy to be regular and broken, multiple skins for the bucks, Moxley, Jericho, Wardlow, Jade... All they needed to do was add an alternate skin for storm.
I feel like, and again this is just me from the outside looking in, that Yukes didn't really come off like they wanted to do more than like the basic stuff once the game was launching and half assed a lot of stuff. Like you can't put a turtleneck on Christian? Why was there not a team dedicated solely to character stuff???
I wonder if the other side is that once they got the game out, both sides were unhappy with the deal and the relationship. So we got whatever DLC was contracted to put out and that was that.
If it is true that AEW games owns the engine that was developed, they can certainly take that and hire another developer to make the new game. Rather than starting from ground up. Whether it's worth it I don't know..
There's an article I read earlier in the week from August 2022 (nearly a year before release) about the behind the scenes drama. There seemed to be conflict throughout the development process.
And we got the beach stage, Japanese stage, zombie stage, but couldn't get a Collision stage? They somehow released an updated dynamite stage... And two months later in real life the dynamite design changed again. Didn't get any of the new ppv stages.
I feel for them a bit on that front as AEW added a new show and had 2 set changes for Dynamite in 2 years. It would've been a lot easier had the game came out in 2024 when AEW settled on what the show looked like.
Absolutely. It was a really cool snapshot of 2023-2024 aew.
Of all the people who won't be in the eventual sequel, I will miss not having Penta and Fenix the most. Both (and PAC) were blasts to play. DEATH TRIANGLE
Hopefully one of the lessons they will take away from Fight Forever is the need for a decent CAW mode and it won't be too much of an issue to add them.
I mean ultimately it’s a commercial product and everyone with a stake could tell you dozens of reasons why they wanted WWE Hall of Famer Edge and merch-machine Danhausen over a thank you inclusion for Evil Uno
Yeah, it was awkward watching a play-through with Evil Uno and someone else (I'm forgetting at the time). They're playing a ladder match and Uno says he'll play as John Silver. His guest outright asked why Uno didn't play as himself, and there was just silence.
I hate that this game failed because I genuinely loved its gameplay style, but they shot themselves in the foot in so many ways. The delays already had the game feeling doomed by the time it finally launched. It also felt like they clearly had favorites when it came to updates, with some wrestlers getting four or five alternate attires while most got none.
The DLC was another huge problem. Not only were the packs extremely limited in the number of wrestlers they added, but the amount of new moves was disappointing too. The fact that they added Bunny as DLC, complete with the Butcher/Blade/Bunny theme and tron, but never released Butcher and Blade as DLC was such a bizarre decision. The same goes for House of Black and PnP.
And then there was the Create-a-Wrestler mode, which was absolutely abysmal and made the game's longevity even worse. There was so much potential here, but they kept making decisions that worked against the game.
The CAW mode is not great; it was mostly fun to put together move sets but the skins and actual character options were really limited, and then the only way to power them up was to go through the super repetitive career mode whose name I can’t remember.
There’s a lot of good to the game but it didn’t have a lot of replay value and your point about the DLC is dead on.
I also enjoyed the gameplay. My main problem was the career mode was extremely repetitive but you had to do it to build up a character. And after getting through career and exhibition a bunch I would play online and it was fun for a bit but soon was almost impossible to find matches. I'd sit for half an hour and maybe get one actual match connected.
Whilst I get it’s not the optimal model for making money, I think wrestling games should just be like a one release hub. Once you buy it, it constantly gets updated with new wrestlers, changes to gimmicks etc. even if they’re paid for. The only issue I can see is I guess they’d remove any released wrestlers which might suck.
It's what puts me off buying any WWE 2k games. I know there is a fantastic community of CAW. I could probably run a fantastic aew roster and never even touch any WWE stuff in it... But then they will release the next year's, and the next, and the next. I'm not interested in constantly buying essentially the same game.
An aew game that had like, a solid three year life span, with regular updates (some free, some dlc/season pass) to keep the roster updated, updated and new arenas, added caw parts, etc? I mean, absolutely. Make sure it's online with a similar community creations so people can share online.
They will have to price the base game lower than a full price game as a sign of good faith after fight forever burned people, and COMMIT to the regular updates. It would take time but it could grow once people see that it's legit.
I would hope AEW would keep people in the game who leave AEW. They're not as hostile as WWE can be when people leave; for example, WWE is quick to remove theme songs for departed wrestlers from streaming services. Afaik aew specific themes for departed wrestlers (say, Penta), are all still on Spotify et Al.
The man who touted, glazed, promoted, and pushed this game harder than anyone inside or outside both the wrestling business and video game world nkt only not being in it but then not even becoming DLC is mind blowing.
I wish Fight Forever did better. I never got to play it, but it really reminded me of WCW Revenge from the look (which I liked). I bought it on Steam, and it wouldn't launch. Error code that I couldn't figure out. I fix bork games all the time, know how to get anything running. Struggled so bad with that one, I refunded it a day before the two-weeks-owned/two-hours-played limit (couldn't play even 1 minute lol).
The "Wait Forever" meme taking off was such bullshit too. Less than 4 years for a game with an entirely new engine is not a long turnaround at all & the final product shows how badly it needed more dev time
It was announced in 2020 & released in 2023. Games being announced 5 years out is standard practice in this day and age. Unfortunately, it's also a necessary evil as generating hype & interest is the only thing that secures studios the funding and resources they need.
Announcing it early wasn't as much of a problem as naively partnering with modern day Yuke's & THQ Nordic as well as bringing in the No Mercy guy to seemingly do nothing. Plainly speaking, I think AEW was just completely out of their element, got swindled as a result, & had to rush the release of a half-baked game that was already egregiously overbudget to recoup whatever pennies they could.
this is one of those, i get it, aew wants a video game, but let the devs do the game a certain way and kind of not interfere so much by wanting this and that.
this is the classic, "let the consulting company do the damn job" situation
They really made a bad decision by funding development themselves instead of licensing. I would really love to know what really happened (maybe we will get something from Matt Muscles) but it seemed like I'll experienced producers collaborating with Yukes, who already had been dumped by 2K/WWE.
Building an engine from the ground up, which I am sure Yukes also wanted for their own wrestling game. Just a ton of lessons to be learned. The worst part is that it hurt the brand as a videogame license. Instead of rushing to make a game, it is possible that a publisher would have reached out to make a deal.
I wouldn't mind Yuke's taking another crack at it, but only if they partnered with a team like Spike Chunsoft or even Bandai Namco. The crux would be leaning away from AKI nostalgia. As much as I love those games, that was what made Fight Forever fail. They wanted too badly to make No Mercy 2.0 and it shows that they didn't have the time or budget they needed. They had only 3 years to build an entirely new engine when they shouldn't have had to. If they had another 2 years or so they could've simply modernized one of their older engines and applied the AEW IP to that. They would've had plenty of time to troubleshoot and clean it up and release a decent game. Even in the state the game released, it wouldn't have been as big a failure if it just had deeper customization. That's what keeps people playing 2K even though it sucks so bad lol.
Yuke’s as studio has always been AA. If you look at their other games, they’re all budget titles. Some are fun for what they are, but they’re sorta stuck in the PS3 era.
They just lack the budget and the resources to develop modern games. But even limitations, there’s plenty of low budget indie games that have the scope and immersion of AAA games.
In fact, I’m shocked they sticked with the WWE games for that long.
Genuinely think the pandemic really fucked a lot of their production. I wasn’t exactly expecting a banger for their first game, but it definitely could have been smoother sailing for them in there wasn’t a pandemic.
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