Sports Illustrated Looks at Enhanced Body Scans and “Beard Tech” in “WWE 2K15”

“WWE 2K15” will be coming to the new-gen consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, making it the first WWE title on such platforms. With the developers having a lot more to work with, “WWE 2K15” will have the most realistic graphics to date, evidenced in the first screenshot to be released of the game.

Sports Illustrated has picked up on the visual perfection of “WWE 2K15,” publishing an informative piece on how 2K was able to make WWE’s stars come to life in the video game. In addition to being shipped an authentic WWE ring, which helped 2K capture more than five times the animations seen in previous titles, it also got to used innovative head body scan technology. The same technology was used in 2K’s “NBA 2K14,” one of its first launch titles on the new-gen consoles back in November of 2013.

“WWE 2K15” Executive Producer Mark Little talked about the importance of the scanning technology:

“One of the things moving to the new hardware affords us is to rethink and retool the game. The entire scanning technology that we used can’t be done for the older consoles. It’s that intense, it’s that complex. What it affords us is the most lifelike images we can get, including signature facial expressions for each superstar.”

WWE Hall of Fame “Stone Cold” Steve Austin also discussed the leaps in terms of graphics, calling it “bad-ass:”

“I think all the facial stuff is bad-ass. I went down to the studio and there were damn near 100 cameras mounted on these vertical posts, and you went through a range of emotions for them to capture. Now when you punch Stone Cold in the game, you’re going to see just how bad it hurts because I gave them all my pain and angry faces.”

Former WWE World Heavyweight Champion Daniel Bryan even chimed in, discussing how his beard was perfected in “WWE 2K15:”

“When I went for my scans, 2K had so much machinery in their studio, it’s like being in the future. I get weirded-out just being around that much technology. I was like, ‘These things won’t give me cancer, right?’”

“It’s incredible what they can do now. The detail they capture is amazing. My beard looks perfect in the game. It looks exactly how it does in real life. But they also have small details like the scar on the top of Randy Orton’s head. He has this small little knick, and it’s detailed perfectly. I know when I was playing the game, when I saw the little things like Randy’s scar, when I saw how my beard looked, I was blown away.”

Little explained, talking about 2K’s innovative “all new beard tech:”

“Scanning doesn’t do beards or hair well, so for guys like Daniel Bryan, we needed to use this new beard tech to get him just right. There is this specific code of technology that we use to get the beards just right, and no beard is alike. Daniel Bryan’s is more open and scraggily, where if you look at a guy like Mark Henry, he has a big beard, but it’s thick and solid. We had to create technology to be able to capture both in a way that not only looked great still, but animated.”

Be sure to read the entire piece by Sports Illustrated, here. It also features quotes from John Cena and Sting.

Editor’s Note

This game is going to be magnificent.