Kenny Omega was a recent guest on the Swerve City Podcast where he explained why the AEW Fight Forever video game is still awaiting a release date.
It all comes down to them needing to “scale back” some of the content in order to hit a “Teen” rating with the ESRB.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
The game’s delay: “It’s totally coming out [laughs]. I’m not sure how much we had to scale it back, but man, I loved it. You could make the ring look like a murder scene if you wanted to. I just hope there is still some way to get a semblance of that. I hope we don’t dumb it down too much. It was fun. It’s what we get every week on TV anyway. It could gory, but no one is getting dismembered, no one is dying. Maybe it could look that way if you beat someone up that bad. There are a lot of things we haven’t shown in the game yet. What I will say is, the game is not a wrestling simulator. I looked at other wrestling simulator games, and I know people love them, and there is absolutely a place for them, but I feel if we go the simulation route, no one is ever going to do it better than Fire Pro because they’ve had decades of practice doing that and they have a system all implemented. What Yuke’s does best is the arcade style of wrestling. What our guys do best is the animator, the guys from AKI. Having those guys cook up animations to correct old animations (from WWF No Mercy) and kind of seminar the Yuke’s people into how they go about doing their stuff rather than MoCap but taking the point of articulation to show the generation of movement or philosophy or force. It’s kind of an ongoing process.”
The delay causing the roster to be outdated: “It does suck that the rating has held us back a little bit because we really wanted to get it out. The longer the time goes by, this finished product that we have of a game is just going to be a little dated. A lot of the same people are going to be there and are there, but some aren’t, and you’re going to wonder why I’ve seen this guy on TV for weeks, why isn’t he in the game? It’s because the game has been done, but we’ve had to try to get our game in a position to be rated so that we can sell it. Now, I can positively say that we’re headed back into a right direction. The fun and zany stuff that I was able to implement, I hope people have fun with it. I think the game really shines when you can do the crazy stuff, but if you want to have serious bare-bones wrestling match, you can definitely wrestle the way you want to and it will look that way, but if you want to do crazy stuff and want to ride around on a skateboard and do a dropkick, you can do it. There is fun stuff like that implemented.”
