WWE 2K22’s MyGM preview: Lots of storylines, lots of time in menus

Making matchmaking choices. Projecting story arcs. Ranking events with your friends. This meta-conversation, especially in the age of social media, is vital to fandom for pro wrestling. WWE 2K22, launching in March, will engage with it all by bringing back a familiar management mode, called MyGM, which puts players in the role of a promoter facing big expectations from WWE’s top management.

2K Sports on Wednesday gave Polygon a hands-on preview of MyGM, along with the game’s standard wrestling gameplay. It’s the first time the general manager’s role has been part of a video game career mode since THQ’s SmackDown and Raw 2008 SmackDown vs. Raw 2008. The WWE 2K series already has analogues to sports video games’ team-based and single-player careers — MyCareer (now called MyRise) and Universe Mode. The GM career is more like a single-season mode, such as MLB The Show’s March to October package.

“Universe is like God Mode, right? Where you have full control over the entire show that you’re putting on,” creative director Lynell Jinks said in a media roundtable on Thursday. “MyGM is more goal-based. […] It’s very enthralled in the WWE Universe, rather than Universe [Mode], where it’s more like it’s your sandbox.”

Image: Visual Concepts/2K sports

In other words, players are working for “the Company” — the WWE itself — as one of five existing management personalities, or a created character. You’re answering to Triple H, a top WWE executive both behind the scenes and as a character. Triple H is overseeing a competition of subordinates, basically; players will go against an AI or another friend also managing one of the league’s four broadcast brands —SmackDown, Raw, NXT, or NXT UK. You aim to be the most-rated show. Triple H, via management emails, will require you to deliver certain results from time to time. Players who don’t set them up are in big trouble.

In this light, the job isn’t to stage manage story beats and rivalry details, it’s to make sure that fan-pleasing pairings are developed and their bouts make for good TV. MyGMA begins with a superstar draft. SvR 2008) and a budget limiting you to hiring about a dozen wrestlers for the season’s run. Randomized games are used to create the pool. Christina Diem Pham, art producer, said that players should develop different weight classes, alignments, fighting styles and genders. A randomized pool is better than drawing from a complete roster.

Drew McIntyre (two-time WWE Champion) was my top pick. His popularity and stamina were unmatched by any other pick in my pool. These attributes are crucial to MyGM’s background calculations to generate fan interest. Popularity means what it says; the fighter’s events will have more appeal. Stamina can also impact their availability and performance.

These rules apply to both matches that can be simulated on-menu and those the user selects to watch, such as an CPU-vs.CPU demo. In two MyGM bouts I took over and fought, neither dominating a match nor drawing it out with a wrestler’s full arsenal of moves seemed to affect the event’s overall rating, although Pham said it is possible to “gamify how you play your matches to get better ratings,” potentially extracting a little more momentum from a given match by actually laying hands on the controller.

Image: Visual Concepts/2K sports

“But then, also it comes down to how you’re building your matches from your superstars, and also the production value,” she said, expressed through things like the arena size and type, the road crew setting things up, and the pyrotechnics package you choose. “There’s a lot of math that’s going on,” Jinks said. “There’s a ton of things going on underneath the surface.”

Where a GM more directly affects a bout’s popularity, outside of putting two fan-favorite fighters together, is in things like scheduling a run-in, where a third wrestler interferes with a match to help one of the participants. But that kind of a match is automatically simulated in the background; you can’t observe it, nor can you participate and have a third AI fighter enter the ring mid-way, for example. The two promos you can schedule are likewise just a dice-roll for their effectiveness; you don’t get to see or hear Big E or Alexa Bliss calling someone out on-camera.

However, it is not difficult to enjoy the CPU-vs.CPU match. Despite this, WWE 2K22 benefits from streamlined gameplay that gets big combinations and counters into the mix, along with more essential blocks and standard strikes, it isn’t on display when two AIs are fighting. The fact that the tables kept falling apart under accidental contact, rather than someone being slammed through them as per the rules, prolonged a table match. A main event bout between Mandy Rose (GMs can choose their champions) and Nikki A.S.H. The fight went on forever and Nikki was finally victorious. NeverAny of the following was landed by her Eight top-rope attacks. GMs can opt to background simulate a match that’s dragging on, but it’s akin to starting the fight over.

MyGM’s weakness in AI-vs.-AI combat and its rather low payoff from background simulations mean that MyGM is most effective when the user has at least one match. This, despite the fact that most people want to use the mode. With a good amount of time spent in menus, or getting the results of background dice rolls, MyGM’s bigger use seems to be as a kind of contextual wrapper, or structure, serving what would otherwise be one-off matches I’d try for curiosity’s sake.

This isn’t to suggest there is no behind-the-scenes management of a show. The show seems to be evolving slowly. It is almost always held in a high-school gym. The school has no option to increase its production or market it. MyGMII allows players to start with $2 million. This gives them the ability to pick as many as 13 or more stars. Players can also stop the draft after 8 picks. The extra cash can be spent on a pool of undrafted free agents, for shorter contract terms, but you’re probably better off saving it up for when a WWE legend becomes available, whether that’s Goldberg putting an end to a surprise champion’s reign, or simply getting on the mic to hype the next broadcast. It is a winning strategy to timing your best moves in order to coincide with, or culminate at the next pay-per view event. You can also goose your own metrics, or sabotage your rival’s show with single-use perk cards.

MyGM wasn’t necessarily as open-ended as I had first assumed; a lot of that depends on using created superstars either in the bouts or as the player-character showrunner. We didn’t have access to created players or that toolkit in the limited time with this build. I tend to build weird homages to 1980s-era rasslers, but I don’t really develop their characters with rivalries or goals beyond being the next champion.

MyGM appears to be a useful, if somewhat limited toolkit offering emergent narrative support and plenty of headcanon opportunities I haven’t considered. Both are critical to my long-term enjoyment of a sports video game, and they’re also the hardest to develop credibly.

WWE 2K22’s launch, on March 11 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, will reveal more.