Things Fans Want From AEW: Fight Forever

Released in mid-2023 after much anticipation, All Elite Wrestling’s first video game, AEW: Fight Forever didn’t quite live up to the hype for many fans. While it was an admirable attempt to evoke classic wrestling games like WWF No Mercy, players were ultimately disappointed with what was missing from the game, especially in the face of how much stuff is packed into the average WWE game.

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However, the state of modern gaming is such that seemingly any major current release is a work in progress, meaning that the developer YUKE’S could fix it with patches and downloadable content. Given that Fight Forever continues to regularly release DLC, it’s possible that fans could have their expectations met. Let’s take a look at 10 things that fans still want out of the game.

Some Kind Of Season Mode

WWE Games Have This As Universe Mode

Pretty much any sports game worth its salt has something akin to a Season Mode, where players can simulate an entire season or even years’ worth of the sport in question. In wrestling games, this usually means putting together weekly, monthly, and yearly schedules of events, and playing through the shows as they planned them. It’s been a standard in WWE games for years as Universe Mode, and so far the best Fight Forever musters is a fun but ultimately unsatisfying single-player story mode, “Road To Elite.”

GM Mode To Book Your Own Cards

Many Players Want To Play As The Promoter

Distinct from Universe Mode, GM Modes in wrestling games allow players to assume the role as the wrestling promoter rather than as the wrestlers themselves. As such, they’re able to book shows, make in-game money, and use said money to sign wrestlers and make other changes to their video game promotions. It can be a fun mode for fans that want to look at wrestling from a macro level, and while AEW has attempted something resembling a promoter simulator with the mobile game AEW Elite General Manager, fans were surprised that Fight Forever didn’t attempt a more in-depth version of it.

A More Robust Create-A-Wrestler Mode

Fight Forever’s CAW Mode Is Surprisingly Spare

For pretty much every gamer, the biggest must for any pro wrestling video game is an in-depth create-a-wrestler mode. A great CAW mode should encourage maximum customizability so that players can not only create themselves in the game, but also anything else they can imagine, from established stars to original characters.

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Unfortunately, Fight Forever’s CAW suite is unbelievably primitive compared to the competition, as most of the options are limited. If there’s any established mode in the game that needs vast improvement, it’s this one.

More Gimmick Matches

There Are Some Common Matches That Aren’t In The Game

Wrestling game players don’t want to subsist on standard matches alone. After all, any fan watching week to week knows that gimmick matches are a great way to spice up the show. While AEW Fight Forever has a couple of gimmick matches including the Ladder Match and the Exploding Barbed Wire Death Match, there are a number of common gimmick matches that are missing from the game. One of the most significant is the Cage Match, one of the most common of all, but also bouts as simple as the Tornado Tag Team Match are strangely missing.

Six-Man Tag Team Matches

A Lack Of Trios Bouts Is Shocking

For the most part, AEW: Fight Forever players can take part in the following matches: singles, tag team, three-way, four-way, and battles royal. One match type that is shockingly missing from the game — one neglects to call it a gimmick match — is the six-man tag team match, which has been present in WWE games for what feels like decades. It’s especially wild in the AEW game considering that the promotion boasts two separate trios tag team titles between AEW and Ring of Honor.

Customizable Match Rules

Players Should Be Able To Determine A Time Limit

To once again move away from wrestling games, even “regular” sports games tend to have a lot of customization options when it comes to the individual matches themselves in terms of things like time limit and the like. Fight Forever sadly lacks customization for individual matches, meaning that players can’t, for example, wrestle a 2/3 falls match. Even something as simple as time limit is overlooked, which is ironic given that AEW famously brought concepts like the time limit draw back to the fore in wrestling.

Backstage Fighting

Players Love To Take The Action Out Of The Ring

WWF No Mercy really was a game changer for fans of wrestling video games. One great innovation was the ability to take the action all the way to the backstage area, resulting in more mayhem. It was so novel that WCW once put out a game that was only backstage fighting!

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It should be noted that those two games came out in the year 2000, and AEW Fight Forever, which notably lacks backstage fighting, came out over two decades later later.

More Stories In Story Mode

Road To Elite Isn’t So Elite

The aforementioned story mode of AEW: Fight Forever, “Road To Elite,” has players go through an entire year of AEW, traveling the roads, working out, and even eating between episodes of Dynamite and the pay-per-views, which is a great idea. Unfortunately, the mode is a little sparse, emulating the branching storylines of older games like No Mercy but in a more simplistic fashion. YUKE’S would do well to expand on this mode for a much meatier experience than the truncated affair players have thus far gone through.

More Frequent DLC

It Seems Like New Characters Drop Infrequently

The rise of downloadable content really did wonders for pro wrestling games. Before DLC, rosters seemed outdated on the release day, but now the developer has the ability to implement more recent additions to a promotion, or lower-level performers who got popular since the game came out. Fans watching AEW weekly have been informed when new DLC has been introduced for Fight Forever, but it seems to be at the rate of one or two characters per month. It’s a weird look, especially considering that fans cannot currently play as AEW World Champion Samoa Joe.

Blood & Guts Match

Many Fans Have Been Clamoring For AEW’s Signature Cage Match

One gimmick match deserving its own section is the Blood & Guts match. Introduced in 2021, Blood & Guts is AEW’s version of War Games, but more bloody and chaotic due to the promotion not having a ban on blood like WWE. Given that Fight Forever introduced a Stadium Stampede mode after release, the idea of implementing Blood & Guts doesn’t seem too outside the realm of possibility. However, it does seem unlikely considering, as established, Fight Forever doesn’t even have a regular Cage Match.

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