WWE 2K22 Has One of the Worst and Weirdest Character Rosters Ever

Even if you’re willing to put aside the Legend content that mysteriously isn’t included in this game (and there’s quite a lot of it) as well as some of the current WWE stars who are nowhere to be found for no good reason, you’re still left looking at a roster of available wrestlers that just cannot compete with the rosters included in pretty much every other WWE game released over the last 22 years or so.

While some of the best professional wrestlers in the world can still be found in WWE, increased competition and recent changes in WWE’s creative and business strategies (most notably the restructuring of NXT) have deprived the company of quite a few workers who are either considered to be the absolute best in-ring performers in the world by their peers and fans, benefit from some kind of unique character/personality traits, or, in a lot of cases, offer some combination of both those qualities.

Whereas previous WWE game rosters benefited from featuring a larger collection of performers who were able to really make a name for themselves in other organizations where they had more freedom to really establish their own characters and in-ring moves, the fact that a lot of those performers have since moved on from WWE means that anyone who doesn’t follow the WWE product week to week is going to be left staring at a lot of unfamiliar faces who feel more at home in the “default” section of create-a-wrestler screen than they do on the roster of the biggest wrestling company in the world. 

That lack of notable personalities already makes the game’s roster feel smaller than it technically is, but the bigger problem here might be the size of the “talent” gap between WWE 2K22’s available wrestlers and how that gap is, once again, sadly similar to the one that exists in the real-life WWE roster. 

Much like the real WWE, WWE 2K22 treats a few performers (most notably Roman Reigns, Brock Lesnar, and certain Legend performers) like gods and everyone else as either occasional contenders or virtual nobodies designed to fill the runtime and make the stars look better. It’s certainly possible to take any wrestler in the game all the way to the top of the company or fantasy book your heart out, but when some of the best technical performers in the world (which includes names like Roderick Strong, Pete Dunne, Ricochet, Sami Zayn, Cesaro, Io Shirai, Johnny Gargano, Keith Lee, Kyle O’Reilly, and Tommaso Ciampa) are stuck with a rating somewhere in the low ‘80s, you’re ultimately left to wonder if the game is trying to punish certain fans/players for liking certain performers or even in-ring styles more advanced than “big move, taunt, repeat.” You have too many performers here who are being treated like second-class citizens for no apparent reason and too many performers who you’d probably only pick as a meme or because you’re desperate to see some kind of new matchup. 

Now, it must be said that you can obviously create whatever character you want in WWE 2K22 and even download pretty much any wrestler imaginable thanks to the talents of this game’s massive creative community. That’s obviously a big selling point, but it’s more than a little sad that players are more dependent on that feature than ever to access wrestlers who should have been in the game in the first place, gimmicks/designs that should have been in the game in the first place, or just to be able to enjoy more diverse and interesting overall collection of characters.

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