WWE 12 gameplay, what's your opinion?

According to the IGN review of WWE 12, the gameplay changes are "breathing new life into its core mechanics." but Computer and Video Games magazine reckons the game "offers little more than some new gloss painted over an old product." . So, which is nearer the truth?

New gloss over a new life? Paint those babies!

Its not radically hugely mid-blowingly different from the previous games. So don't believe anyone who says it is. What we have is not a radical reinvention of the wrestling game.

Instead, what we have is an evolution of the wrestling game to the point where its getting closer to the ga,e it always should have been. AI is smarter, moves flow better, animation is crisper, reversals and counters work better, have better timing, and can be worked into strategy more easily. You can work body parts more easily, that sort of thing.

The AI especially is a welcome step up. Its a legitimate challenge now on the harder difficulty levels and you feel like you're in a fight.

Its like Ferrari replacing the F430 with the F458. Its still a Ferrari, it still shares the same basic DNA, but its a bit better in every way than the car it replaces, and in certain key areas, the improvements are dramatic and noticeable.

I feel the gameplay is finally perfectly up to snuff where it should have been for the past four entries.

For 08, 09, 10, and 11, the sim aspects were the strongest point of the SvR series by far, way over the gameplay, but now I finally feel as if they both match up perfectly to form a solid 10 with gameplay matching everything else in sheer gold.

Both ends have caught up to meet each other at last and I couldn't be happier.

I'm getting the game tonight, so will be able to check out the new gameplay. I'm really looking forward to giving it a go.

I've had a chance to play the game now, and I love it! The matches are so much better. The computer tries it's best to win, and I realy enjoyed the matches I've played so far. The only problems are with the breaking point submissions and pins. How do I kick out of a pin, and how does the breaking point submission thing work? I seriously can't work out how either works, and the manuals that come with the game (the paper one and the in-game one) are both rubbish.

For pins you just hold the A button until it's in the blue area and then let go.

For Breaking Point submission you just wear your opponents relevant limb down during the match with the limb targeting system to wear that body part (head, legs, or arms) down.

And then when you're in the Breaking Point submission, just mash the main 4 buttons as much and as fast as you can. If you did some damage on that area, the meter should fill up quick. If not they'll reverse it.

But if you hit RB and break up the submission before you lose the minigame, you'll just break the hold, which is what I do alot when I get a submission applied when I didn't want to apply it.

I know Shand said he doesn't like the pin system, but I gotta disagree. I LOVE it.

I feel like it makes kicking out an actual event, and that you might not always make. (Although I can usually kick out the first 2 times.) I feel like the new pin system is one of the things I like most about the game, really.

It adds that desperation feeling that matches should have to be exciting. Especially how sometimes it doesn't appear until the 2 count that really makes it exciting. And makes me feel even more accomplished when I make it in time.

I didn't like it at first because, not being used to it, I got pinned a couple of times after one or two moves, which isn't realistic.

I've obviously gotten better with the timing, but I still don't like it. I much prefer the drama of not knowing whether or not I'll kick out, and it being decided by applied logic to cumulative damage.

Yeah, but the problem with the old system is that you could always kick out if you just jammed on the buttons hard enough.

It apparently was also a major problem with everyone kicking out constantly no matter how much damage they took. Turbo controllers aside, even.

I never found that, personally. If you took sufficient damage, you'd be pinned.

Thanks for the explination Mike.

I don't mind the new pinning system, it's different but it's not so bad.

TBH the gameplay still has a few things to be sorted out, and the AI isn't that great either. It's a big improvement on last year but I think they could have spent more time fixing bugs and stuff from last year. For that reason I'd give it 8/10

The bad AI and bugs are probably due to it being the PS3 version of the game

lonewolfshanehunt wrote:

The bad AI and bugs are probably due to it being the PS3 version of the game

No, I have a 360 and I'll vouch for Jox in that the bugs and glitches are pretty fucking terrible on this system, too.

I actually have a whole rant that I can get into on that note some other time, but i'll give a really short version of it here, that I'll expand on, another time....

But my feeling is that THQ, the guys that actually draw out the blueprints, think of everything they want in the game, come up with all the features, do all the mocap, the design work, the community management, the quality assurance, the planning, the WWE talks, hold all the meetings and make all the corporate decicions.... I LOVE them. I think they do a great job on this game every year, and I think they're the best...

But YUKES... the technical developers in Yokohama, Japan that do all of the coding and the complicated, assembly of these things, really suck and I hate them. Yukes are the ones responsible for the sloppy-ass coding, the glitches, the bugs, the freezes, and the bad design decisions that render the loading and data management of the game shitty, they're fucking horrible.

Usually, everything that does happen to be wrong with these games is almost entirely on Yukes's end and is mostly the fault of their incompetent and sloppy coding and the generally bad patchwork process they have.

There's a reason that such a first-time game that was developed in-house by THQ San-Diego and not Yukes, like WWE All-Stars turned out to be great and worked so well for a first try. Mainly that Yukes was not involved.

I somehow wish that at this point they could scrap the Japanese developers there without losing all of the past work to build on, but at this point, the only people that probably know how to handle the buggy, shitty assembly code that they've set up, probably only makes sense to them anymore at this point, so we're most likely stuck with them.

Now, THQ's brilliance shines through, and they have generally taken charge of the project and improved the series in all the right ways. But the Japanese dudes at Yukes are always the ones that have built this precarious house of cards that always feels like it'll fall apart (or glitch up at least) at any moment.

I'd imagine, if I were to actually able to crack this game open and get into see how this game was programmed and coded, it would be the most chaotic, nonsensical, patchwork mess inside there, seeing how almost anything new in the game, seems to nearly break it.


It actually makes me respect THQ more, seeing how they've managed to make this game series so good and have so many great ideas to put into it and such good ways of planning it all out, just for Yukes to somehow barely manage the commission without breaking the goddamn game every year.

I mean, if you actually go and look at all the few other things that Yukes have developed, aside from the Smackdown games, they're responsible for some real crap.

I was only kidding...

I know. Only the first part of my post was answering that, saying that the 360 is just as bad.

The rest was just me remembering that this was on my mind, already. I was gonna post something about how good THQ is, and how much Yukes annoys me, like, last week...... but I forgot to.

For instance...

Yukes made Sword Of The Berzerk: Guts Rage for Dreamcast. It was a piece of shit.

They also made Last Leigon UX. It was a peice of shit.

They've made other titles, but just this year they also released Real Steel: The Video Game, which is also, surprise... a peice of shit.

Outside of Smackdown WWF/E games, they aren't known for a lot of positive work.

Eh, it could be worse.

Remember Smackdown 3: Just Bring It? Goddayyyyyum

Oi, that game was horrible.

The worst in the entire series. Absolutely. They're first title for the Playstation 2, I believe. And it shows.

Yukes had no fucking idea how to program for that system, and was obviosly their first attempt at it.

Matches glitched constantly. Menus froze HALF the time. Wrestlers during matches would lock up and get stuck in mid-move or mid-animation and hang there until you restarted the whole goddamn match. It was atrocious, and definitely holds the all time record for the most game killing bugs in a SD game.