WWE 2K17 OS Community Impressions

[azdawgpound]

Quote: Originally Posted by mcavner

Is anyone else experiencing ridiculous slow and sluggish loading screens? It seems to get slower and slower - does having more 'stuff' (CAW's etc.) slow down the game or something? And not just before the game loading screens, right now I won't even bother with creating entrances b/c the loading screen there feels like it's just timing out or something b/c the load time is so long. And I'm still experiencing a lot of crashes. About 1/4 of the time my game crashes right before the second wrestler would enter... I've switched to entrances off it is so bad.

Ive been getting slow loading screens and been getting error codes I don't think it has do with amount of caws etc it just seems to have days where things load slow.

[Brandwin]

How do we chain wrestle in 2K17? I never had an issue doing it in 2K16.

EDIT: Nevermind. I realized what I was doing wrong. I was able to chain wrestle quite a bit last night.

[nml11287]

Anyone not able to perform corner comeback moves since the new patch downloaded?

I've had 2 matches, one with Bryan and one with Cesaro, where the wrestler just freezes up after the prompt shows up and I press triangle to initiate the comeback. Pretty annoying stuff.

[nml11287]

Quote: Originally Posted by mcavner

Is anyone else experiencing ridiculous slow and sluggish loading screens? It seems to get slower and slower - does having more 'stuff' (CAW's etc.) slow down the game or something? And not just before the game loading screens, right now I won't even bother with creating entrances b/c the loading screen there feels like it's just timing out or something b/c the load time is so long. And I'm still experiencing a lot of crashes. About 1/4 of the time my game crashes right before the second wrestler would enter... I've switched to entrances off it is so bad.

Yep. I had custom RAW, SD, 205 Live arenas, CAWs, custom belts and the loading times were out of control. I just kept my CAWs and belts but went to default arenas.

[Tiki Snakes]

The only thing that really seems to slow loading down is using custom titontrons for wrestlers, least that's the only thing I've encountered.

[Hooe]

I had the chance to play WWE 2K17 a bit over the holidays, my brother RedBox'd it while I was back home in VA. I came away from it with mixed impressions, but it was still an enjoyable time:

- the in-ring gameplay was sluggish when I first picked up the controller to "re-learn" everything, having spent what like six or seven months not playing WWE games. The animations are a lot more fluid, but there is a lot of waiting around doing nothing, or getting no response from pressing buttons because you pressed grapple while your opponent exited the kneeling pose to finish getting up.

- "taking bumps" and/or "selling" needs to be its own gameplay mechanic. On top of downtime between state transitions, there is also a lot of downtime in this game when you aren't dealing out offense, most of the time because your opponent is working you while you wait for your Reversal stock to recharge. 2K would do well to put something for users to do in this case beyond mashing X to get up. Replace damage recovery with a QTE, at least.

- I like the triple threat ring-out concept, but again the game basically has me doing nothing for like 45 seconds in this context. Give me something to do.

- I like that the game rewards move variety now via the match rating system. I still feel like there's more that could be done in this regard, but this is a good start.

- I also like the new taunt system, once I figured it out. It's not well-explained, but it adds more nuance to expressing oneself in the ring beyond just min-maxing the momentum meter. Wake-up taunts being always available is also useful for avoiding the "free" reversals that the CPU sometimes gets when I try too many ground grapples (why does this happen? it feels blatantly unfair.).

- I find myself wishing the in-ring UI were more contextual and, well, not there at all. I don't like that I have to take my eyes off the action to check how much spirit I have, my reversal stock, how charged my reversals are, if I have a signature available, etc. etc. I'd prefer if there were commentary and animation cues for these things. At the very least use UI prompts over my wrestler's head instead, and maybe reserve a button on the controller for summoning the UI if I want to check these things manually. But like, I don't necessarily need to know that I have 30% Momentum because Momentum doesn't do anything unless it reaches 100% or 150%, so why does that number have such prominent screen real estate?

- the AI took some steps forward this year. Wrestlers are going to the apron to do springboard moves, heels are leaving the ring to get weapons, managers are messing around with me in matches, etc. etc. I think this is the biggest reason why the game is just bottom-line more fun to play this year.

- the commentary still sucks and is somehow worse than last year. On top of obviously missing the current commentary teams (Cole / Saxton / Graves and Mauro / JBL / Otunga), it's just nonsensical. JBL keeps rambling about how many finishers I've used in a match and how ineffective they are, despite that I haven't used a single finisher in the current match. It has a hard time keeping up with the action, there's not enough idle chatter, there are too many repeat lines, the voice acting work quality is mixed (Cole and King Lawler still at least sound like they are trying, whereas JBL's performance is some of the least convincing voiceover work I've heard in a AAA game), and in some cases it's unpolished; there are a couple pre-match lines where I could hear beeps and pops at the beginning and ends of audio clips.

- the entrance animation quality is and game graphics in general are very inconsistent, most notably with the women's wrestlers (this problem is evident with the men's wrestlers too but I'm sticking with the women here for sake of example). Some of them look half-dead (Becky Lynch, Alexa Bliss), while some look like dead ringers for their real-life selves (Emma, the Bellas). Sasha Banks' entrance motion looks like the motion capture performer is trying way to hard to pretend to be Sasha Banks, and Bayley has the blank expression of an axe murderer. Meanwhile, Eva Marie's likeness and entrance is basically captured perfectly. Some consistency in quality here would be really nice.

- Create A Wrestler parts load much much faster than what I previously remember, which makes me feel like I'm not wasting time in the mode (especially compared to 2K15 which was awful in this regard). Create An Entrance is also really neat, though there's a weird bug where certain music clips (the ones assignable to shows; ex. Modern 1 / 2 / 3, Underground 1 / 2) will restart between segments if you have the music clips set up a certain way which frustrated me. I haven't tried Create A Show much, hopefully that also loads faster, but generally speaking the game remains a great sandbox.

- MyCareer is still a shell of a more compelling career mode. It at least tries this year, I guess? But I still feel like it's a lot of busy work for not a whole lot of payoff. The mode on-boarding experience in the Performance Center particular is not compelling at all; the game just throws you in the ring with some dudes and has you go at it without attempting to teach you how to play. A more compelling and authentic experience would have you learning the controls, different moves, heck even teach "taking bumps" by virtue of teaching the strategy of managing Reversal stock or some sort of bump-taking gameplay mechanic. I'm imagining WWE Breaking Ground applied to a video game and how that could be a lot more fun than the experience which currently exists, especially wrt creating a connection between user and on-screen avatar, establishing relationships with AI characters, etc. etc.

- Also for MyCareer: the in-match goals the Authority gives you are often nonsensical busy-work, and intentionally losing matches doesn't feel rewarding because the mechanics of the game don't really reward "putting on a good show". We're still dealing with what is loosely a fighting game with wrestling avatars and not a wrestling game; there's no incentive in the game mechanics to allow your opponent to get the upper hand. There's no incentive for playing as a Face and deliberately taking damage to build crowd support for a match-winning rally. One thing a future WWE 2K game could do to this end: charge the momentum meter for the Face (up to 100% or some other non-finisher threshold) while receiving damage and charge reversals faster for the Heel (up to the next full slot) while receiving damage.

- I haven't really tried Universe mode yet so I have zero thoughts on it.

- I've already stated multiple times what I think of 2K's post-release content support plans for this game so I won't be rehashing that here. Generally speaking, not a fan.

Bottom line, I think what exists now is a fine sandbox more than a fine video game. Which is not a criticism in and of itself, sandbox games are a lot of fun, but with WWE 2K in particular it remains the case that one will only get out of it what he puts into it.

[ManiacMatt1782]

So uhhhhhh, Where is the showcase/story mode?

[jvalverde88]

Quote: Originally Posted by ManiacMatt1782

So uhhhhhh, Where is the showcase/story mode?

Don't know when but they're releasing Hall of Fame showcase DLC.