Breaking news has shaken up the WWE videogames world today.
Yuke's senior vice president and producer Hiromi Furuta has released an interview to VideoGamesChronicle, announcing that Yuke’s are creating a new wrestling game to compete with WWE 2K20 and the WWE 2K Series.
Yuke’s has been a developer company of WWE Games for over 20 years, before being joined in 2014 by the 2K Studio Visual Concepts. Now, it looks like the two teams are going to split up and create rival wrestling games.
Furuta said that Yuke’s hasn’t been happy with what they achieved in recent WWE games, and are looking to go in a different direction. This will also fill the lack of competition in the wrestling genre, which in her opinion, has been detrimental to the series.
“I think having no competitor isn’t healthy at all. When we had competitors in the wrestling space, we were determined not to lose and that was a great motivator for creating something great. But right now, looking at the market demands, players are expecting something new every time we release a game and we feel like we haven’t achieved what we’ve really wanted to do."
Yuke’s has been the only triple-A developer in the genre since 2006, when AKI Corporation stopped making wrestling games.
“We are aware that our creators are beginning to lose sight of their passion and confidence and becoming focused only on completing assigned tasks. That’s not the direction Yuke’s wants to go in.”
The Yuke's team is working on a brand-new wrestling IP which is on the early stages. As we understand, the new wrestling game in development could still be based on the WWE programming, as Hiromi said: “the new project we have in mind will be the internal competition for WWE.”
They’re also looking to utilize their proprietary motion capture technology, ALiS Zero, which has not been adapted for WWE 2K Games. This new system uses AR cameras to render motion capture performances in real time, and does not require post-production on the data, saving a lot of time in the process.
However, Yuke’s has still not decided the target audience for the game. Furuta said it could go in either a “very realistic” direction or introduce fantasy elements.
“We’re not chasing money or trends. We’ll go in whatever direction we feel is most interesting, combined with the passion of whoever leads the project. As long as whoever leads the project has enough passion, then I’m sure we will achieve our goals."
“In terms of our new wrestling project, there are many experienced creators here in this field so I’m confident it’s going to be an awesome game.”
This can be exciting news for wrestling games fans, as this will mark the first time in almost 15 years where two different IPs of wrestling Games will be competing with each other.
Are you looking forward to this new era of rival wrestling games?
