Modern sports games are always on the lookout for new ways to play other than simply “let players play the sport they bought a game of,” and to that end, WWE 2K25 featured the online mode The Island. It landed with a dud, but can it be fixed for WWE 2K26? Here’s what we’d like to see.
Bring It To All Versions
Before getting into the various things we believe need to be done to make this a game mode worth playing, it’s time to address the issue that not everybody who bought WWE 2K25 even got to play the island. While the game was released across the two most recent console generations and PC, it was only the current generation console versions that had the mode. For the older generations, this is likely a permanent decision, as developers more and more frequently move away from older generation versions. For the PC, however, this needs to be fixed.
While it’s admittedly a bit, “waiter, this food stinks and also you didn’t bring me enough of it,” to complain about not having access to a mode broadly considered to be bad and broken, it is still off-putting to see two versions of the game going for the same price while not providing the same gameplay options. If The Island is fixed, it will be a worthwhile experience, and if it’s valuable, it’s one PC players deserve, too.
Give It A Showpiece Story
The best way to get players invested in a new game mode is to make it irresistible to players, and creating fun, exclusive modes is an excellent way to do so. While the mode has had exclusive content in2K25, it was all too often found to be underwhelming, leaving fans wondering what all the hype was about. Creating a proper showstopping online mode for The Island could solve this problem.
Professional wrestling is all about storytelling and comes with a ludicrous amount of versatility in how to tell that story between the many match types and the combination of sports action and soap opera drama that writers can use to tell it. If The Island gives players a story mode campaign that is fun and enthralling, they will flock to the online mode to play it, and once there, it’s easy enough to play around a bit and see what else is on offer. Done right, a story gets players through the door while the rest of the Island experience keeps them there.
Make Events Worth Playing
Following on the theme of giving players a reason to actually try and then enjoy their time on The Island, one of the benefits of a live service gaming approach that could be used to balance out some of the less savory elements of it is the ability to keep things fresh and provide gamers with unique, ever-changing experiences. Online gaming experiences are often designed to be at their best when played consistently over the course of a release cycle, and to make that actually the case, you have to make it worth players’ while.
Fortunately for developers, wrestling is a sport that makes it easy to come up with fun events and promos to run. There is no offseason in professional wrestling, which means there’s always another big pay-per-view around the corner you could theme out an online event toward. That provides plenty of options even before you start looking into the sport’s rich history. The game already includes famously large rosters of both current and past stars, so put them to good use, making the online mode as fun and fresh as possible.
Streamline The Experience
Fun gameplay once you’re in your matches is ultimately what any online game mode is going to live or die on, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t smaller things around the edges you can do to make it even better. One of the loudest complaints when The Island debuted was one shared with its more-established sibling in NBA 2K’s MyCity mode: entirely too much time spent not playing games and instead trying to get to the place where you can play your games.
Sure, it is a fun idea to build an entire open world for players to move around and interact with, but as it turns out, not every game needs to do its best Ubisoft map icon extravaganza. Rather than focusing on creating a big world to run around in, which players found to be a slow and clunky way to find their way to different gameplay options, developers should focus on making it as easy as possible to get from what you’re doing right now to what you’d like to be doing in the mode. Shrink things down, make control when moving more fluid, and the whole experience gets better.
Provide Meaningful Goals
On the one hand, using achievements and unlockables to extend gameplay can feel a bit crass and a way to artificially expand the reach of a game, but the reason it works is that ticking things off lists, even if the reason is just that there is a list and they’re on it, can be fun. Many gamers enjoy having achievements to tackle, and a well-designed list of challenges, trophies, and rewards can make gamers’ time with a game much more enjoyable.
This was not the case with the first iteration of The Island, with gamers most notably blanching at a challenge deemed “trolling” due to the fact that a gamer playing full-time for a year would still have struggled to accomplish it before the next game released. Challenges are a chance to guide players through the fun on offer in a game, not to set false markers or boring, arbitrary tasks.
The mood around The Island has not been positive, but there’s always the next edition. Do you think WWE 2K26 can fix what ails it, or is it doomed to remain a maligned mode?
