One of the main reasons I even got into watching the WWE when I was younger was because of the female wrestlers like Trish Stratus and Stacy Keibler. What? I’m a guy. Deal with it.
I checked out WWE All Stars last week, and noticed that there wasn’t a single female fighter on the roster. So I asked Mike McTyre, one of the producers on the game, why we won’t be seeing the lovely Divas of past and present.
“It was simply a matter of scope,” Mike told me. “We really strive for quality of animation, you know, smoothness. Even though the moves are over-the-top, making them all believable, they all came from motion-capture to start with; nothing was hand-keyed. Then the animators had to smooth them out, amplify them and make them over-the-top. To do that would require a massive amount of additional tech and all-new motion capture on a female skeleton, as opposed to the male skeletons.”
I later asked Mike how many moves per wrestler we would see: we can expect the average of 500 each. There’s overlap, of course, but some fighters like Bret Hart have done so many moves in their career that they’ll be doing more in comparison to someone like Triple H. So I can see why the team would skip working on female fighters when so much is going into all the male ones as it is.
There will be a character creation mode, however, so you could always go the tranny route if you really wanted to. Stan Keibler and Tre Stratus, anyone?
