WWE 2K19: Cover, Top Features and Additions to This Year's Roster

AJ Styles might be the face that runs the place on SmackDown, but he's also the face plastered on the front of the WWE 2K19 case. 

Get it? The Phenomenal One is the cover boy for 2K Sports' latest WWE offering: 

Styles only gives up his spot on the cover to the legend Ric Flair himself, who gets immortalized with the game's Wooooo! Edition. 

Dropping October 9 for all players, it's only fitting a game with Styles and Flair on the cover promises a reinvention in key areas. 

Roster Breakdown 

One of those reinvention areas is the official roster.

It is a beast, flirting with the 200-wrestler mark. It makes sense considering 2K Sports is once again weaving in the main roster and a host of others spanning NXT, legends and beyond. 

2K Sports has slowly rolled out the roster through a series of funny videos with superstars like Rusev and Lana: 

The roster has a little bit of everything when it comes to surprise additions. It wasn't easy to predict a superstar from NXT like Montez Ford getting the digital treatment, yet the adherence to making the game as realistic as possible is admirable. 

Other fun additions include Ted DiBiase and legends like the pairing of Diesel and Razor Ramon. 

And the roster won't stop growing. Names like Bobby Lashley, Ricochet and EC3 are already planned additions via DLC, so the 200 number isn't going to be a limiting factor. 

Top Features

The return of Showcase mode is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about new features in WWE 2K19. 

While Showcase isn't a new feature per se, the beloved mode took a hiatus for longer than fans would have liked—2K Sports' response to the endless requests was to feature fan favorite Daniel Bryan as the centerpiece of the mode. 

Bryan's story in the mode spans 11 historical matches and features in-depth interviews with him as an added bonus, taking inspiration from the great documentaries WWE Network regularly rolls out. 

WWE 2K19 creative director Lynell Jinks talked with GameSpot's Mat Elfring about what makes this year different.

"[Jinks] went on to add that the difference between this and previous incarnations of Showcase Mode is that WWE 2K19 adds an emotional element to the storytelling because this is all in Daniel Bryan's words," Elfring wrote.

Fanservice from 2K Sports isn't limited to Showcase mode, though. MyCareer gets a facelift this year in the form of a totally revamped experience favoring a storytelling aspect as opposed to a create-a-character grind.

It is expected to serve as a nice change of pace compared to prior years, and fans should rightfully be excited to see what 2K Sports can do creatively while having access to all the unique characters on the WWE roster. 

More than anything, this year's new features in WWE 2K19 are about fun, achieved by experiencing Bryan's career-long journey and being told a memorable tale in MyCareer. 

Outside of those modes, features like a new Big-Head mode add some levity to the subject matter. And a new Tower mode is a carryover from other fighting games and lets players dive head first into gauntlets of their choosing.  

Jinks stressed the fun emphasis with Elfring:

"It's kind of our motto this year was to make the game fun again. We looked back on—like if you look at Towers—of things that we used to think were fun when we were kids, before we did this for a living, and it's just like you think back on a lot of the older sports games or fighting games, like these are the things that I remember being fun."

Delivering on the most-requested features from fans and dreaming up new ones meant to offer a diverse pallet from which to experience the WWE Universe is the best avenue 2K Sports could have gone with this year's release. 

From the sounds of it, WWE 2K19 isn't the typical annual sports-game release. Fanservice goes a long way for any video game series. Outside of feeling like their voices have been heard, playing the most-requested features is simply fun, which seems to be the motto for the Styles-covered release.