WWE 2K26 MyFaction interview: Talking microtransactions and mixed gender matches with the popular mode’s leads

Since its original inclusion in WWE 2K22, the MyFaction mode has become one of the most popular parts of the WWE 2K series.

For those not familiar with it, MyFaction is the game’s equivalent of the MyTeam mode in NBA 2K, or Ultimate Team in EA Sports FC, offering a collection-focused take on the sport inspired by trading cards.

Players build up their MyFaction roster by collecting wrestlers, then use the MFP (MyFaction Points) earned in the mode – or VC currency earned through real money purchases – to buy new packs, strengthening their faction with increasingly more powerful superstars with better stats.

As with the series’ other modes, every year WWE 2K series developer Visual Concepts adds new features to MyFaction in an attempt to keep it fresh and ensure players are not only happy to start each yearly entry with a brand new faction, but continue to remain engaged until the next game rolls along.

For WWE 2K26 – which is set for release on March 13 with early access on March 6 – MyFaction will be getting a new Quick Swap match type, as well as intergender matches (which had previously been available in other modes) and a new chemistry system.

Despite my general reluctance to engage with its microtransactions – I only made a single purchase in it this year, as mentioned in the interview below – MyFaction is still the mode where I’ve spent most of my time in WWE 2K25, putting well over 100 hours into it.

As such, when I got the opportunity for a quick chat with MyFaction product owner / lead designer Terrell Carter and MyFaction associate designer Brian Mazique to discuss the new features being added to MyFaction in WWE 2K26, I was happy to take them up on the offer.

Can we start with Quick Swap? Until now, when you play 4v4 tag matches, especially in Faction Wars, it seems to be the same situation every time where you try to isolate one opponent, pin them a few times so their partners are no longer allowed to interrupt the pin, and then beat them. Was Quick Swap designed to stop that?

TERRELL CARTER: Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head, Chris. The idea originated for Quick Swap… I don’t know how many years you’ve been playing MyFaction but if you were there at the beginning you’ll remember the early Faction Wars, where it was only 4v4 the whole time. And yeah, we saw fans’ reactions to that, and the behaviour of playing, and were like “this doesn’t seem fun”.

We wanted to create something a little bit faster, a little bit more direct, where you can still play as a team but not have all the troubles of a traditional 4v4 match in our game. So yeah, Quick Swap was supposed to be that, where you get to bring in your team of four but you only have to worry about the 1v1 match-up.

It’s going to be a KO win condition for this in year one, and the goal is to knock out all opponents on the opposite team. You don’t have to go to the side of the ring to tag anyone, there’s a button combination to tag your teammates in, and they just swap in immediately and you get right to the action.

Also, your special and your finisher bars are shared between your teammates, that way you don’t have to swap in and build this other person’s meter up, and finish your stock up. The only thing that’s not shared is health. But the goal is to try to have quick action, less burdensome for those interferences that happen, and you just get straight to the action.

So presumably there are times when you can’t perform the quick swap to avoid it being spammed? Is there a cooldown, or is it a situation where if the opponent’s stunned they can’t swap out?

TC: Yeah, there are certain occasions where it’s not valid to do a quick swap. Generally, you can only do a quick swap when you’re standing in idle. You can’t do one when you’re down, or if you’re on the apron or on the top rope, you can only swap when you’re in an idle standing position. That way we mitigate any problems. It makes it feel a bit more strategic, too, because you have to get back to that neutral space.

One of the new modes in 2K25 was World Tour, which a lot of players liked. Is that coming back in 2K26?

TC: Oh, yes.

I don’t know what happened with it in 2K25, but it looks like there were other regions planned for it, and things didn’t work out that way? It started with just US missions, and Japan was only just added to it fairly recently, and even though it hints that the UK is also on the way I’m assuming it won’t make it to the game in time now. Are there measures in place for 2K26 to make sure everything that’s planned for it rolls out smoother this time?

TC: Yeah, we learned a lot this first year out with World Tour. It was pretty massive. One of the biggest things we chose to do for 2K26 is to break it up into smaller chunks. It’s the big chunks that take a lot of production time, take a lot to get out, so breaking them apart into smaller chunks and also having more regions available from the start of the year is going to help out quite a bit with us being able to get that content out to the players.

So you should be able to expect smaller, more frequent updates than last year for World Tour, but it’s definitely coming back.

Intergender matches were introduced in 2K25 but MyFaction didn’t have it, meaning players were still building separate male and female teams. Now that intergender matches are being added to MyFaction this year, is that across the board, and completely scrapping the men’s and women’s divisions in the mode, or is it just a modifier for certain special matches?

TC: It’s completely across the board. There will be occasions where there are certain requirements, where you have to take one or the other in, but the majority of MyFaction is going to be whatever you want your faction to be, it’s going to be allowed.

Presumably Faction Wars is back too, so does that mean you no longer need to have a team of four men and a team of four women, and it’s just a team of four superstars of any gender?

TC: It’s just one clean team. We’ve actually changed the make-up of Faction Wars. There will be Starter Decks that you start with, so it’s going to be a randomised starting point for your MyFaction journey.

All the decks that you can load into Faction Wars have their own effectors to influence your run, so that’s going to be exciting to see players play that. But it’s going to be a new, fresh take on Faction Wars this year.

This is a long question, but an important one! I noticed that last year, around about August, you released the Diamond Plus Pack, where you could get a bunch of VC, a load of card packs, some evolution cards and the two cards needed for the big August and September live events. Was that a test to see if there was an alternative way to monetise Live Events, where usually you need a specific card and – if it’s a newly released card – you have to keep spending money on packs in the hope you’ll get them?

At the moment, for example, there’s a Live Event where you can get an Infinite Bron Breakker card, but you need a specific 99-rated AJ Styles Royal Rumble card to take part, and I’m not spending $100 on a bunch of card packs when there’s no guarantee I’ll get him. So I’m looking at that Live Event and saying “I’m not doing that”, whereas if the card was available for a smaller fee (as with the Diamond Plus Pack, which I bought) I might have considered spending a small amount to guarantee access, as opposed to a large amount to risk it. If that makes sense?

TC: That makes sense. I will say we try to find ways for players to utilize their collections or… basically, if there’s something that requires a player to spend, we try to give them extra benefit for it. So the hope is that players don’t feel like they’re required to make that purchase to do anything in the game, but if they do make a purchase, there’s some extra benefit they get for it, there’s some utilization they have outside of just purchases.

So we try to give more content based on those things, rather than be ultra restrictive. Hopefully it doesn’t feel ultra restrictive to the players. I know me and Brian talked about just mixing things up for Live Events for the upcoming year, just having those different levels, different varieties of things that players can do for Live Events.

So we have some of those that ping-pong off of something that you might have purchased, but also have general ones that you can just grind in MyFaction for and not have to worry about all that other stuff. Hopefully it doesn’t feel too restricted, but “it’s like a bonus” is the intent behind it.

“We have some [Live Events] that ping-pong off of something that you might have purchased, but also have general ones that you can just grind in MyFaction for and not have to worry about all that other stuff. Hopefully it doesn’t feel too restricted, but ‘it’s like a bonus’ is the intent behind it.”

BRIAN MAZIQUE: I would say also to that, even to that specific instance – You’re talking about the Encore version of Rattlesnake Rage. This is happening right now, you gotta have the Galaxy Opal AJ Styles and take on the Stone Cold, and you get the Infinite Bron Breakker. So even for that one, that one’s in its second run now. So now that Galaxy Opal AJ Styles is actually in the Card Market, you don’t have to pull packs to get it. You can put your MFP together, go straight to the card market and get that card, and then there it is.

[note: the Live Faction event in question is currently not yet an Encore event, meaning the required card is not yet in the Card Market, but Mazique’s answer suggests an Encore event may still be coming]

BM: It’s almost like, if you focus on it, if you play it that way, you can kind of say “currently I’m grinding right now, I’m going after this particular card, so this is the MFP, I’m trying to stack the MFP to get there” or what have you. And you know, obviously along the way you get different packs and some of the cards are gonna give you MFP because you already have them, and so it’s kind of like a journey through that.

So I think one thing that we always try to do is never make it where your hands are tied where you can’t just get a card. We never want that to be the case. So that was a lot of the reason why Encores were created, so that it was never a situation where you were at a point where “I’m opening packs, I’m opening as many packs as I can, I just haven’t pulled the card”.

At this point, it’s like, once the card is in the card market, I’m never really in that position. I can go directly to the card market and get the card that I want, or that I need to unlock the card that I want.

I think the other major new addition we haven’t discussed yet is Faction Chemistry. How does that work? Is that based on the four superstars in your squad?

TC: So, you know before you load into a match you have your four-card line-up, right? So all the cards this year will come with personality traits associated with them, both positive and negative. Those traits will contribute to chemistry effectors – five positive and five negative – and so depending on what traits your line-up has which synergise together, you will contribute to a certain effector.

So there’s certain personality traits that could contribute to… I’ll say one of them is Teamwork, which increases your chances of a run-in for your team in eligible match types. So it’s going to be based on personality traits and how many of them synergise across your line-up. And the more you have that synergise across your line-up, the stronger that effector is, and that includes your negative traits as well.

One of the things that could happen if you have bad chemistry is that your teammates in a tag match could deny you tagging them in. So it should be a fun dynamic to help influence who you decide goes into your line-up, so giving you more tools to decide how to create your faction, is the aim for chemistry for this year.

“One of the things that could happen if you have bad chemistry is that your teammates in a tag match could deny you tagging them in.”

Presumably that also helps to dissuade players from just picking their four highest-rated cards every time, because it might not end up being the best four when chemistry is taken into account?

TC: You can still do that, but there’s benefits outside of that. So the benefits that you get from chemistry could be better than what you get from setting your line-up as your top rarity folks. You should still be able to do that, but you’ll have to tool around to find the right combination that you’re okay with in terms of team chemistry for that match.

Finally, I like unlocking the Elite action figure versions of the superstars as Persona cards in MyFaction. I see that WWE 2K Battlegrounds is being delisted soon, so there’ll be no more arcade-style WWE game around. Who do I pitch to get an arcade spin-off of WWE 2K which only has the action figures, fighting in a toy ring in somebody’s bedroom?

TC: The Elite figures will be coming back in 2K26 and funnily enough, we’ve talked about stuff like that quite a bit.

BM: Same idea, same idea!

TC: Like, “these could be in their own game!”. But no, they will be coming back for sure this year [in 2K26].