WWE 2K17‘s pre-order bonus character Goldberg ruined last night’s Fastlane PPV, and is now on course to do the same at WrestleMania 33 in a main event match against Brock Lesnar.
Goldberg returned to the WWE as a result of 2K Games contacting him to appear in its latest WWE 2K video game, similar to how Sting joined the wrestling company after he was brought in for WWE 2K15. However, unlike Sting’s underwhelming WWE stint that saw him lose both of his PPV bouts, Goldberg immediately squashed Lesnar in his return match before setting his sights on Universal Champion Kevin Owens. In yet another incredibly short match, Goldberg made swift work of Owens following moderate interference from Chris Jericho, and will now head into his WrestleMania rematch with Lesnar as the new Universal Champion.
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It’s an incredibly dubious decision from the WWE to once again invest so much in part-timers rather than helping to establish their current stars. The Goldberg and Lesnar match may be a big draw for the casual fans that Vince McMahon likes to tempt back to the product around WrestleMania season, but it certainly didn’t need the Universal Championship to elevate it. On the other hand, the Kevin Owens and Chris Jericho story has consistently been the most entertaining thing about RAW, and deserved to be the big title match heading into ‘Mania.
Instead, we have 50-year-old WWE 2K17 DLC Goldberg holding the belt, struggling for breath in his post-match interview despite only hitting two moves in a match that lasted 22 seconds:
Considering that even in his heyday Goldberg wasn’t exactly known for putting on 5-star performances, it seems very likely that ‘Mania’s main event will be a short-lived affair, with Lesnar toppling his rival before inevitably laying down for Roman Reigns at some point in the near future. Oh, joy.
But none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for WWE 2K17. If 2K hadn’t reached out to Goldberg, asked him to become an incentive for people to pre-order the next iteration in their perennially glitchy WWE video game series, then Goldberg wouldn’t have squashed Kevin Owens yesterday. Hell, he wouldn’t even be at WrestleMania this year. After so many years of people wrongly blaming video games for real violence, it turns out that the only crime that games can be blamed for is giving us a shitty Fastlane main event and a potentially shitty ‘Mania main event, too.
So thanks, 2K Games. Not only do you consistently put out near-broken wrestling games with terrible single-player modes and poor online functionality, but now you have to go and resurrect a relic from WCW to main event the WWE’s biggest PPV of the calendar year in 2017. Maybe in WWE 2K18 you can go all out and add Doink the Clown as the pre-order bonus, hm?
