An Open Letter to THQ

A Letter to THQ
By
John T Perkowski

Dear THQ,

Thank you for your most recent attempt at a Wrestling game, Wrestlemania XXI. We appreciate the effort into creating a solid Wrestling title, but we, the Xbox owners of the world have a few requests to make in the next version.

Please stop trying to make your own wrestling engine. All your attempts to do that thus far on Xbox, (I refer to Raw, Raw 2, and WMXXI) was a miserable failure. Japan has many stellar wrestling games whose grappling engines can be licensed with a minimal to moderate fee. I refer to King of Coliseum, Fire Pro Wrestling, and All Star Pro Wrestling. Squaresoft, who owns ASPW, would love to make more money, and they have just signed with Xbox. Spike, who owns both KoC and FPW would love to have a significantly larger presence in the American market. Both of these games are solid wrestling titles and a port with WWE Wrestles (or wrestlers from other leagues) wouldn’t be a bad idea. If nothing else, make friends with AKI and re-license the WWE No Mercy engine.

If you must make your own wrestling engine, please stop trying to make a bad copy of an existing one. WMXXI is abviously a copy of WWE No Mercy, albeit a badly designed one. WWE Day of Reckoning is the same thing as well, but it least it doesn’t embarrass its history. Spend the time and make something unique. Trust us, we are very forgiving. We don’t care so much about development time as long as the gameplay is good.

If you must use your own wrestling engine, just port one over from an existing system and tweak it for Xbox. Yeah its cheap, but at least the engines don’t embarrass you or the Xbox system. Port one over, give it entirely new content, redesign it for the Xbox joypad, and sell it. Your more likely to get positive press and sales will go up.

We care less about flashy graphics and more about gameplay. All the reflection mapping, blood effects, outfit options, and crowd details don’t make up for a crappy game. Learn Acclam’s mistake. All those graphic tweaks, outfit options, and fancy effects didn’t stop them from going bankrupt. Don’t fix the wrong problem! Focus on what we actually want, instead of what looks good in a magazine of in a downloaded video.

Don’t use motion capture! While it makes for fluid graphics, it also makes for dis-jointed animations and a hard figure out grappling engine. Use hand drawn animations, it looks better and works better with a game. If you need more proof, look at two games that used motion capture recently: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and WMXXI. These poor representations of a Jedi and a wrestler can show you evertyhing you need to see. There are frame skips, clipping, and graphical glitches everywhere. Keep the motion capturing to a minimum, and smooth it out with a professional studio.

Please try to create some way to update the rosters. By the time we get a game, the roster is several months out of date. Assign a team to do this over the much lauded Xbox Live, and people will flock to the games. If Madden can offer a roster update, why cant you?

If your going to let us play over Xbox live, please give us some options. We can play one on one matches… Thats it. We can’t play Royal Rumbles, Ladder Matches, Table Matches, Street Fights, or any number of a dozen different match types online. We can’t see custom intros sets or hear well chosen custom music, despite our high-speed bandwith. We do however, get lots and lots of lag. Take a lesson in online play from Team Ninja and thier stellar Dead or Alive: Ultimate, and get us some online options!

Most important of all, please let it be fun! If we enjoy it, we will buy it. We will forgive the stuff that really doesn’t matter, as long as you focus on what does.

As long as you do this, THQ, we, the Xbox wrestling fans, promise to support THQ created Xbox wrestling games every time a new one comes out. Thank you.

Signed,
Xbox Gamers of the World