In a recent interview, All Elite Wrestling world champion and executive vice president Kenny Omega revealed that his league's upcoming video game would be a fully-featured affair that includes a campaign, multiplayer, and a character creator. Developed in collaboration with ex-WWE game developers Yuke's, the AEW console release looks to bring the wrestling genre back to its arcadey glory days. With legends like Sting, Taz, Jake "The Snake" Roberts, and Arn Anderson on their roster, that certainly seems like an attainable goal. However, the game's focus will likely be the same as the promotion's weekly television product, pushing younger stars like Darby Allin, Ricky Starks, and Jungle Boy into the spotlight.
The company has released a few minutes of early gameplay footage that recall games like WWE All Stars more than anything in the genre in the past few years. Chris Jericho, Kenny Omega, and Hikaru Shida all look like action figures, but accurate ones that also reflect the performers fans watch every week. It remains to be seen if Yuke's can capture this balance for an entire roster, but the action and look of the game seem to have a unique style that should draw in eyeballs whenever the game is ready for release.
Talking with IGN Japan, Omega went over the ambitions that his promotion has for the gaming space. The as of yet unnamed console release will have plenty of content for both solo players and those looking to play with friends. Omega has compared the game in development to the work of Yuke's back in the Nintendo 64 days. This was the time when the developer created games like WWF No Mercy that are still cherished by wrestling fans the world over. Omega also promises a roster that reflects the growing number of wrestlers migrating to AEW, as well as unusual modes outside the promised campaign and a create-a-wrestler feature.
One thing AEW's game will not do is compete directly with the WWE 2K franchise. Omega makes it clear that he doesn't want to mirror what wrestling looks like on TV or use extensive mo-cap to capture every move, saying, "I always felt that the way that [Yuke's director Hideyuki "Geta" Iwashita] had created his systems, even though it wasn’t with real people in mo-cap, it was more accurate." Outside of the N64's No Mercy, Omega cites both Fire Pro Wrestling and the PlayStation 2's King of Colleseum as influences, and he hopes he can modernize some of the systems from those games into whatever AEW outputs. The game is penciled in for a 2021 release, but Omega also seems ready to delay the game if it's not ready for primetime, saying,“I want the release version to be good.”
Even if All Elite Wrestling's console video game turns out to be an oddity, it will likely be embraced by the greater wrestling community. Not only is AEW the coolest promotion in town, but the wrestling gaming landscape has been in pretty dire straits for years now. The WWE 2K series has all the momentum of a boulder trapped in a canyon and the less said about WWE 2K Battlegrounds, the better. However, with Kenny Omega's heavy involvement and a reinvigorated Yuke's at the helm, fans may really be in for something special.
Source: IGN