Two weeks ago, WWE and 2K Games released their annual video game WWE 2K18. The game has been met favorable reviews, currently sitting with a score of 70 on Metacritic. It looks better than previous years, plays about the same, and added new modes that may or may not work depending on the time of day.
But, after one week, no one is talking about the new modes or large roster. They’re talking about the glitches that include invisible walls, ghosts, and more. Within 48 hours of the games release, “WWE 2K18 Glitches” turned into a trending moment on Twitter.
Some fans were turned off by the game being “broken” while others, like myself, laughed at the absurdity of phantom ankle locks.
That video comes courtesy of newLegacyinc, a group of avid wrestling video game players from around the world. They’ve been posting various videos pertaining to wrestling games on YouTube since 2009 and have become infamous for finding glitches in the 2K series. While the group doesn’t take credit for every glitch shown in the Twitter moments montage, the majority of those glitches ended up coming from their channel.
Going all the way back to WWF SmackDown! series on Playstation, the newLegacy Big Boys have played the game with a motive of finding fun over realism.
Within the first 24 hours of 2K18’s release, they found a glitch that took wrestlers into the crowd and far beyond.
nL member Johnny called the glitch his favorite from any game they’ve ever played. “There's just so much that we find through this one section of game play,” said Johnny. Fellow nL members Duel and Htial echo’d Johnny’s sentiments.
The group showed the glitch to fellow WWE gaming streamer Chris Denker, who has helped promote 2K18 on his channel and has been featured on Xavier Woods’ UpUpDownDown channel.
Given the ties between Denker and WWE/2K games and his friendship with newLegacy, it seemed possible that 2K would reach out to newLegacy to help them catch these things before the game is released.
However, as Johnny tells me, that hasn’t been the case. “We've never been asked by the 2K team to do anything like that,” he said. On the stream that featured an appearance by Denker, Johnny elaborated by saying that the group isn’t opposed to pre-playing the game for glitches, but that they would want to stream it for their fans.
Given that the newLegacy guys were finding new glitches in WWE 2K17 up until a few weeks prior to the release of WWE 2K18, it’s unlikely that Visual Concepts and 2K Sports will be able to fix and catch every glitch in the game.
And the newLegacy guys wouldn’t have it any other way. “Stuff like Universe Mode crashing during 'promo' segments, etc., those are the things we would like patched,” said Johnny. “But, glitches like being able to float into the crowd, those are all good with us! Keep ‘em!"
