[BreakABone]

Well here is the developer's commentary from IGN's latest update. There are some hands-on impressions as well.

Hi I’m Nick Vladica (sp?), I’m responsible for the creative on the WWE franchise of video games. I’m going to take some time to walk you guys through all of the cool little things that we’ve added to the game this year. So basically we’ll go through all of the things we’ve overhauled starting with gameplay. We’ve spent a lot of time pretty much re-engineering the entire AI, so first starting off with the control system. What we’ve done this year is added both a regular weak grapple right into a move, but we’ve also added a strong grapple where you lock up and then have a whole variety of moves available to you. This can be done both from the front of the superstar or you can flip around to the back of the superstar. What we’ve also done is added a big strategic element, basically there is a counter for both the grapple and the strikes. So the control system has fundamentally changed like I just talked about with the weak grapple versus the strong grapple.

As far as gameplay, we’ve focused on a few core areas, one being location specific damage. So basically the idea here is two-fold. One is you work your opponents body part, it could be his arms, it could be his legs, it could be his head with your end goal being making him submit in that particular body part. We really show this to the user, one, when his arm gets worked he actually walks around holding his arm so you can see it visually and the second thing is one of the things we added is superstar attributes. Every superstar’s got different amounts of strength, agility, and stamina. If a superstar’s arms get worked, lets say he starts the match at 100 percent health, well he does 100 percent damage to his opponent. If he has his arms worked for a while basically any move that will involve his arm, he will do less damage. If his arm is 50 percent damaged he’ll do 50 percent less damage in all of his moves.

One of the big things we added for this year is a new single player mode. One of our criticisms for last year was that we didn’t have a compelling single player experience so we’ve listened to our consumers, listened to what they wanted and everybody wants to take the action outside the ring. It’s great to fight inside the ring, its great to fight against your friends in the ring, that’s true to programming, but hey you know what? It’s a video game. Lets do something fresh, let’s do something new. So what we’ve done is really held true to the integrity of the WWE’s programming, to their style but wrapped a unique very much WWE storyline full of turns and twists, double-crosses with the usual likes of Vince and Stephanie with real world environments. Fully interactive environments, be it a construction site, a shipping port, a parking lot, a shopping mall, things that feel alive that you can throw your opponents through that you can use to whack your opponents with… But in addition to that also have compelling missions in each of these environments. So you have your overall objective for the mode but within each of these environments you have X number of missions that you have to fulfill to complete the environment. So we’ve taken WWE style gameplay mechanics, for example Royal Rumble, or Hell in a Cell cage match, for example Royal Rumble, you have to throw your opponents over the ropes. Well in the construction site, which is a multi level construction site with an environment that you can roam around where you fight different construction workers depending on your mission, one of your objectives is to throw them over the platform to the lower level to knock them out, similar to the Royal Rumble where you throw someone over the top rope.

As far as animation goes, we spent a lot of time focusing on both cleaning up the animation and adding the whole selling element to the game. In wrestling one of the big things is showing off pain, the impact of moves, so we’re spending a lot of time making sure that the user feels like he is in the ring by how much the superstars are actually showing off their pain. I think the game is a 180-degree turn from last year in terms of the controls, graphics, animation, modes, we’ve really changed everything. Core elements of the game have been changed substantially based on consumer feedback so we’re really excited. A great sign is what the development team thinks of the game so we’re having a lot of fun playing it right now, everybody’s loving it, and we’re only at a pre-alpha stage. We’ve got all the features in place that we’re really going to build out, now its just a matter of tuning those and bringing them to a level that consumers expect. We’re really excited, and as far as consumers go I think they’re going to really love this product.