Insider Gaming is reporting that WWE 2K26 will bring back "The Island," its answer to NBA 2K's "The City." For the uninitiated, The Island is an open-world (kind of), but like its NBA 2K counterpart, it's really a giant FOMO simulator. Look how cool that created player's shirt, shoes, and/or skateboard are!
It's designed to peer pressure you into buying all the dumb stuff 2K sells for created characters. It's not fun to watch players dribble past you constantly, and know you'll have to grind for 50 hours to be as good as they already are. It's soul-sucking. And the players in The City will happily help 2K by applying their own peer pressure.
"Why don't you upgrade your player, my dude?
"Because I don't want to pay an extra $100 to play the game I already bought for $70."
"Man, if you broke, just say that."
While its purpose is every bit as transparent in the NBA 2K games, The City at least makes sense in basketball culture. If you want to play some hoops in real life, there are a lot of places to do that in any major city in the United States. There are way fewer places to learn to be a pro wrestler, and certainly not one on every corner.
Basketball fans are used to paying far too much for shoes. There are stores in my neighborhood where you can "cash in" classic shoes. The only place I can unload my vintage NWO T-shirts around here is Goodwill.
While the casino-laden philosophy behind The City is deplorable, even a hater like myself must acknowledge that several of its game modes are fun. It's very easy to enter The City and emerge two hours later, wondering where your time went. In contrast, I played The Island only long enough to write this post about how much I hated it.
I didn't even go back to The Island to complete my wrestler collection with Goldberg and Nikki Bella. I meticulously unlock all the wrestlers that come with the game's free or battle pass modes, but I didn't want to encourage them locking more content behind The Island. As an old school WCW fan, this is the first game Goldberg was in where I just didn't bother unlocking him.
I did my part to discourage this nonsense, but I know it's mandated by 2K's stockholders. Clearly the money they made was more than the backlash they got. With rumors that EA Sports FC is considering its own open-world, I guess these modes will be industry standard for any sports or sports entertainment game.