The crowd responds to your character in two ways, the first based off the performances you give, and the other is based on your tactics. Your actions in the ring, and even how you handle yourself after matches, help you in that department. There’s more to popularity and alignments than just promos. If you play your promo right, you can win a verbal encounter, increase your popularity with the crowds, and fall into more of a heel or face role with the crowd. These responses also give your wrestler a personality, and the more your alignment and your personality traits grow.

It’s your job to tailor a promo to fit the crowd and play off them to either make you more of a face or heel. Much like the actual WWE, there are family friendly crowds, hardcore crowds, respectful crowds and disrespectful crowds. Regardless, your responses need to be tailored to the crowd, which is not the same from city to city. Generally this is used to call out another wrestler, but there are times, like interviews for instance, where that’s not the case. In this, players cut a promo by picking one of four lines. Players can actually make their characters feel more like a heel or face through the new promo mechanic. You work on your superstar’s gimmick, appearance, and most importantly your heel or face alignment.

Players start at the NXT Performance Center with former wrestler turned actual development coach Mat Bloom. These aren’t nitpicking issues they’re just straight up issues. The creepiest thing is actually the audience they look like a robotic cult raising their arms in unison, praising some kind of deity in the ring. That extends to the character models that barely look like the wrestlers they try to portray, along with hair clipping through their bodies. So right out of the gate, I need to make it clear that WWE 2K17 is not polished. That was unfixable as both characters were caught in an animation loop, and I had to turn off the console in order to return. A quick rundown of some of the more memorable issues include: a wrestler being billed from “Winnipeg Ontario Canada” even though Winnipeg is not in Ontario (stupid idiot!), me power slamming someone who was on the other side of the ring, and a match-breaking glitch where in the lead up to my finishing move my character stood over my opponent while he rolled around on the ground for 5 minutes. The water cooler talk with this series always revolves around the bugs, and I experienced a lot more serious errors in my time with WWE 2K17 than I have in any of the games from the last three years.

Before I get too into new features of WWE 2K17, let’s get one thing out of the way.

Unlock goldberg in wwe 2k17