If you're a vintage wrestling fan, you probably remember one man who could take any punishment dished out at him – be it being tossed from the top in a Hell in a Cell match or receiving a Pedigree right onto a bunch of thumbtacks. Mick Foley, a.k.a. Mankind knew how to make a bloody mess of himself for the fans' entertainment. Of course, times have changed, and the likes of WWE and AEW aren't allowed to show as much blood and violence on screen.
However, in an attempt to reach a wider audience, THQ Nordic was hoping to receive a T for Teen rating by the ESRB for AEW Fight Forever – which it did, but only after a bit of back and forth. AEW star Kenny Omega spoke about the reasons for the delay in rating and launch date on the Swerve City Podcast (thanks, VGC). Firstly, he mentioned that the game's content had to be scaled back in order to attain the desired T rating.
"I’m not too sure how much we had to scale it back, but man, I loved it," he said. "You could make the ring look like a murder scene if you wanted to. I hope there’s still some way to get a semblance of that, I hope we haven’t dumbed it down too much.”
However, if we were to be pedantic, this trailer released three months ago appears to have way more blood and gore than this one released only about a day ago. In fact, the more recent trailer tries to mirror a real match between Adam Page and Bryan Danielson, but the actual match had way more blood than the video game one. Of course, this is only based on two separate trailers, so it isn't hard evidence of the blood and gore being scaled back. Still, it hardly looks like the "murder scene" that Omega mentioned. We'll only be able to confirm that when the game finally releases.
But that's only the rating; the release date was pushed back for another reason as well, namely the inclusion of certain wrestlers whose future with AEW may be in doubt. In November last year we reported that CM Punk, who was the predominant cover star until then, was removed from the cover. This was after Punk went off-script during an AEW promo and berated the company, as well as his fellow wrestlers. This resulted in a real life backstage confrontation, leading to Punk being stripped of his AEW World Championship title and getting indefinitely suspended from the production.
"It does suck that the rating held us back a little because we really wanted to get it out. The longer time goes by this finished product that we have is going to be a little dated, continued Omega. "A lot of the same people are going to be there and are there but some aren’t and you’re going to wonder why [someone I’ve seen] on my TV for a week, why isn’t he there?”