At the end of the day this is based on a near 20yr combat engine. They can tweak it all they want but the underlying DNA is this arcade wrestling game called Smackdown!.
At this point it's high time to start from scratch. Bottom up, new engine. Maybe even a new developer. Any potential, those sparks of brilliance, that the series occasionally had is weighed down by the overall gameplay. It's almost the same issue Call of Duty has. Each game would have one or two interesting ideas, but you're still playing CoD once that fresh car smell fades. Any annual game really.
Then again, maybe people are fine with WWE2k being what it is. It's still fun and the multiplayer is consistently good by design. I personally have a hard time getting back in without custom soundtracks for CAWs since 90% of the reason for getting it was running our created promotions and not having our characters coming down to specific music hit us hard.
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