Also Fight Forever is at the THQ Nordic showcase next week
AllEliteWrestling announced like, I dunno, three games at once a couple of years ago. They all sounded terrible and we haven’t posted about them (also because a bunch of them aren’t on PC).AEW: Fight Forever, still officially Coming Soon, is their first crack at a sweaty graps sim to rival WWE’s series, and today it was confirmed the publisher is THQ Nordic. This not only means that we’ll see more gameplay at next week’s THQ Nordic showcase, per a tiny teaser, but it adds another horse to the confusing carousel of companies that have worked on wrestling sims.
A press release tells me that Kenny Omega, a man who has moves named afterFinal Fantasycharacters, hadan Undertale-themed promo, and once came to a matchdressed as Sans, said “one of the first things I did after signing with AEW was to ask Tony Khan to let me help assemble the best gaming team on the planet, to make the best wrestling game ever.” The thing is, the most recent WWE games haven’t set the world alight.2K22has been better recieved, but2K20was panned to a “stop, stop, he’s already dead!” level, so Fight Forever doesn’t even need to hit best ever status. If it can manage to beslightly less janky than the competition, AEW could be on to a winner. Heck, Yuke’s might be able to dust off some old assets as well. They’ve surely got a CM Punk and a Chris Jericho knocking around.
It’s actually a nice mirror of how AEW’s existence has invigorated pro-wrestling a bit. Whether you like or hate either company, WWE subsuming all rivals and having no competition for years was very boring (and I’m not even going to get into the current shenanigans going on over there, good lord). At a base level, consolidation is bad for consumers and competition is good. Perhaps a rival game series will spur Visual Concepts to greater heights as well.
Personally, I’m just pleased that we’ll get more press releases where PRs have to work in pro-wrestling terms like “push” or describe rights deals as the “tag-team event of the century”. Look out for more Fight Forever at the THQ Nordic digital showcase on August 12 (that’s next Friday).
