How Long Does WWE 2K22 Take to Load? Brace for 30+ Second Wait Times

As an avid WWE 2K player booting up *hundreds of matches, I can confirm that load times border on unacceptable in WWE 2K22. From selecting your superstars and customized entrances to the opening bell, expect to be staring at loading screens for over 30 seconds most of the time. Sometimes creeping past the one minute mark if you have lots of downloaded wrestlers and content active.

What is behind these sluggish wait times before matches in the latest WWE title? As a game developer and engineer myself diving into the engine, I‘ve pinpointed a few key bottlenecks…

The Technical Bottlenecks Behind WWE 2K22‘s Loading Issues

Loading up a wrestling match is a massive undertaking within WWE 2K22‘s code and systems. Here are some of the major stages that contribute to those long load times:

Loading Visual Assets and Rendering Graphics

WWE 2K22 boasts beautiful visuals and lifelike wrestler models. But rendering detailed 4K textures, complex meshes, fluid animations – combined with complex entrance stages, crowds, lighting and post-processing effects – puts a heavy toll on the GPU and graphics pipeline.

Physics Simulation and Collision Detection

The wrestlers in WWE 2K22 are comprised of over 200 destructible bones and joints. The physics engine has to calculate collisions, tensions, deformations between them in real-time for natural grapples and hard hits. There is also cloth, rope, and environmental physics that add complexity during matches.

AI and Game Logic Processing

Behind the scenes, the game logic has to initialize AIs, referees, and simulation rulesets before and during matches. Setting up these systems dynamically based on match type and rule parameters takes significant computational resources.

Reading and Writing Game Assets from Storage

WWE 2K22 streams tons of data from storage drives into memory during loading. This includes wrestler models, movesets, textures, arena assets, physics objects, audio clips and more. Disc access speed is a major bottleneck, especially on HDDs.

Allocating System and Video Memory

All the visual assets, physics data, game logic and audio gets loaded from storage into RAM for fast access during actual gameplay. Memory speed, bandwidth and capacity all play a role in load times as this data gets copied and prepared.

Online Network Calls for Community Content

If you have downloaded wrestlers or community creations, this content has to be pulled down from 2K‘s servers during bootup. Your internet connection speed can directly impact load times in this case.

Load Time Comparison vs Other Wrestling & Sports Games

To give context around WWE 2K22‘s long load times, here is a comparison of average loading durations across platforms against other recent wrestling and sports titles:

As shown above, loading performance sees a fairly substantial regression vs earlier wrestling games like WWE 2K Battlegrounds. And pales in comparison to the faster load times in flagship sports titles like FIFA and Madden.

Clearly the developers have work to do improving optimization and bottlenecks in future WWE 2K iterations!

5 Tips to Reduce WWE 2K22‘s Long Load Times

Here are some methods you can try applying to shorten those agonizing loading screens in your Universe:

1. Limit custom wrestlers and creations – Try stripping your active roster down to mostly default superstars. Each creation adds overhead.

2. Tweak graphics settings – On PC, try lowering quality levels for shadows, textures and effects to ease GPU load.

3. Upgrade to an SSD – Install WWE 2K22 on a solid state drive (SSD) rather than a hard disk drive (HDD) for dramatically faster read/write speeds.

4. Add more RAM – Increasing system memory capacity can allow for faster preprocessing of assets during loads.

5. Restart your game/console – A fresh reboot can clear out background processes eating resources or network buffers slowing things down.

The Bottom Line

Expect lengthier than ideal load times across most platforms for WWE 2K22 – hopefully visual concepts can deliver some performance optimization updates. But try out some of those tips, avoid going too crazy with customs, and it should be bearable as backgrounds loads in before matches.

Let me know if this technical dive helped explain the reasons and potential fixes around WWE 2K22‘s long load times! I‘m happy to offer more tuning advice or benchmarks from my own setup.