Back in February, Rocksteady Studios Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was shown off to the world as the centerpiece of a PlayStation State of Play. This hugely anticipated title is the follow-up to the beloved Batman Arkham trilogy, has been worked on for years, and promised to deliver intense cooperative gameplay featuring Harley Quinn, Killer Shark, Boomerang, and Deadshot.
The reveal was supposed to stoke the hype fires up in advance of its launch in May, but… well, it’s safe to say that the reaction from the gaming world caught the studio off-guard. The response was almost universally negative, with players criticizing the simple-looking “shoot the purple weak point” gameplay, that the game needs to be always online (even in single-player mode), the presence of a battle , and a distinct lack of enthusiasm about equipment that gives “22% melee damage on Batman-infused enemies”.
All this went down like a wet fart, and soon afterwards there were reports that the game wasn’t going to hit its May 26, 2023 release date. But it seems the hammer has come down harder than we could have anticipated, as Suicide Squad has just been confirmed to be delayed until Feb 2, 2024. Considering that the game was originally supposed to release in 2022, this is a huge delay, and something is definitely up.
What’s going on at Rocksteady?
The official statement says that this delay is “necessary to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players.”
You can read a lot into that, though it seems very likely that Rocksteady Studios and its partners were spooked by the reveal reaction, and have made the hard choice to go back and try to rework the game. We suspect that, at minimum, aspects like the always-online requirement and the battle , cosmetics, and buff system linked to equipment will be substantially reworked.
Looming over all this has to be the crushing failure of Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers. This 2020 release is also a major superhero license, and has a lot in common with Suicide Squad design-wise. By all rights, that title should have been a home run, but the live service aspects saw it released to mediocre reviews and low sales. Square Enix eventually reported that the game had lost $63 million for the company, describing it as a “commercial disappointment”.
A company the size of Square Enix can swallow a loss like that (albeit unhappily), but if Rocksteady faced a similar situation it may go out of business completely. This leaves the London-based studio with no easy decisions: either roll the dice and hope that the widespread disappointment was just a symptom of a botched reveal, or try its best to fix the game.
The latter has been chosen, which all said is probably the smart option, likely made with Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto’s famous quote that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad” ringing in their ears.
How could Suicide Squad 2.0 turn out?
After so long in development, much of Suicide Squad will be now locked in. Cutscenes, key art, voice-acting, game engine, score, and sound are now complete, meaning that the coming months will almost certainly see Rocksteady frantically trying to strip out the online components. Co-op multiplayer isn’t going anywhere, but we suspect there’ll be tweaks to improve the game as a single-player experience and the always-online requirement is going to bite the dust.
We’ve also just seen a lot of drama over Arkane Softworks’ Redfall launching on Xbox at a measly 30FPS, so it’s possible that Suicide Squad also needs some further work on performance and optimization to get it released at a smooth 60FPS on all systems.
When the game was budgeted, financial forecasts will have priced in DLC sales around the battle es and microtransactions, so don’t expect them to disappear completely. What may eventually arrive is an alternative battle system that removes elements that could be accused of giving those who splurge on DLC a gameplay advantage in favor of cosmetic alterations that don’t affect combat (as per Fortnite‘s model).
Arkham Knight launched way back in 2015, meaning everything Rocksteady has is riding on Suicide Squad. We still have a lot of respect for this studio and its staff, so fingers crossed they can swerve their video game Titanic out of the path of the iceberg and into calmer waters.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will release on Feb 2, 2024.
Published: Apr 14, 2023 02:58 am