Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will go down in gaming history as a cautionary tale. After all, Rocksteady Studios were once the undisputed kings of superhero games, dazzling the world with the fantastic Batman: Arkham trilogy.
After a nine-year wait they returned with the multiplayer-focused Suicide Squad earlier this year. Hopes weren’t exactly high after a disastrous preview that saw the game delayed for a full year, and the final product arrived to tepid reviews, skeptical players, and a myriad of technical issues.
Now Jason Schreier has performed a post-mortem on the game’s development, with inside sources spinning a tale of managerial incompetence, publisher greed, and countless poor decisions. This will be a familiar story to anyone with insight into the gaming industry and the full column is worth reading.
But it’s a comment on X about Suicide Squad‘s future that turned my head.
Shoved into an early grave
As a live service game, Suicide Squad was intended to have a multi-season roadmap ahead of it. Leaks indicate that this would have lasted at least four seasons, gradually introducing new playable characters while slowly bringing back the Justice League.
More specifically, we would have seen the return of the much-missed Kevin Conroy as Batman, with the release timing making this almost certainly his final performance. But, as per Schreier, that now seems like it’s not happening. In response to a query about the game’s future, he said that we can expect merely “barebones support”:
Many saw this coming. Suicide Squad‘s concurrent player numbers on Steam hover around 100-150 people, even with the game on deep discount so soon after launch. Even the introduction of the Joker as a playable character failed to move the needle, though that DLC release was met with groans when people realized they’d have to grind to unlock him.
We don’t know exactly what “barebones support” means, but as Schreier says the developers are now working on an update to Hogwarts Legacy I suspect it’ll be limited to technical patches and server updates than any major content releases. There’s a chance that some additional player characters will still be released, but Warner Bros. Interactive may have seen how poorly Joker sold and decided not to throw good money after bad.
In a lengthy post on X, Miller Ross said this tallied with what he’d heard and gave some more insight into what had been planned. The idea was that the core Suicide Squad story was patterned after Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame:
“The broad strokes (including post-launch) were nailed down between Infinity War and Endgame at a time when they dominated pop culture, and it takes clear inspiration from those films. The heroes lose, the credits roll… only for them to come back and get their revenge. That’s really it. It’s not the boogeyman so many people have blown it up to be. I’ve heard that [Sefton] Hill was a hardliner for leaving the audience shocked at the end of the game at the heroes seemingly having all died, and multiple Rocksteady developers I’ve spoken to characterized themselves as “begging” him to leave more clues regarding the Justice League’s inevitable return to help stymie some of the predictable backlash.”
This means that Suicide Squad may well fizzle out without a proper ending and Conroy’s final performance will be junked. If you’re feeling optimistic we might get what’s already in the can cobbled together into a couple of cutscenes to tie a bow on the narrative, but right now this feels like wishful thinking.
It’s safe to say anyone who bought this game at full price or spent money on its terrible cosmetics will be feeling pretty angry right now, and justifiably so. Then again, you can’t say you weren’t warned that this exact thing would happen, and the decaying corpses of Anthem, Redfall and Marvel’s Avengers should have dropped a big hint on how this was going to pan out.
Well fortunately lessons have been learned and Warner Bros. Interactive will never do anything so stupid again. No.. wait, hang on. Oh, my mistake, their head of games J.B. Perrette said in April that they want to ditch single-player campaigns to focus on:
“Live-service[s] where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis.”
… oh wonderful. Remind me how much these execs get paid again?
