A week before its release, around 20% of WWE 2K22’s roster no longer work for WWE

videogameschronicle.com:

WWE 2K22‘s roster has been officially revealed, and it includes 34 superstars that no longer work for the company, making up around 20% of the playable characters.

Departed talent has been a long-standing issue for WWE games due to their lengthy production cycle, and how frequently and randomly WWE releases its talent.

However, this past year has seen the WWE release over 100 superstars from across its multiple brands, making the number of cut wrestlers still present in the new game somewhat less unsurprising.

However, while some superstars on the list have only just left the company, such as Cesaro, others such as Billie Kay and Peyton Royce were released from their WWE contracts as far back as April of 2021.

It was also recently revealed that musician Machine Gun Kelly will be playable in WWE 2K22, as part of apost-launch DLC pack.

The full roster for WWE 2K22 is (superstars who have left WWE marked with strikeout):

When it releases on March 11, WWE 2K22 will be the first WWE 2K title since the series skipped an annual release due to the disastrous launch of WWE 2K20.

WWE 2K20 was a disappointing full debut for developer Visual Concepts, resulting in one of the lowest Metacritic scores in 2K’s history, mostly due to a huge number of technical issues at release.

In 2020, in a bid to enact a “renewed focus” on quality, publisher 2K hired former Double Helix studio head Patrick Gilmore to take over WWE 2K.

In VGC’s recent WWE 2K22 hands-on, we said: “While we’ll need to spend longer with its in-ring mechanics to see how they hold up to repeat play sessions, the core changes that have been made here are enormously positive ones, and will hopefully result in one of the better WWE games we’ve seen in a while.”