Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was Rocksteady’s final season is upon us, it is genuinely baffling to know that it came out this year and is was received so abysmally for a live service that taking it offline feels like giving the developers at Rocksteady some mercy after letting them suffer the pain of working on this game.
Remember This Live Service?
Before we bore witness to the embarrassing cancellations of Concord and more recently Xdefiant, the first game that had bitten the dust was Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice league. The game had launched with glaring issues in terms of mechanics but those who bought it soon realized their grave mistake.
The game did not have features and the experience a typical Seventy dollar game should offer, the gameplay was pretty barebones where we could pick each member and mostly just traverse the map to kill bad guys that were perched upon the rooftops.
It had a pretty mediocre story paired with it which was only advancing through escorting trucks through the streets of Gotham among other limited types of missions. The mission structures felt lazy at best and downright insulting at worst given the price. This coupled with the fact that the game had a lot of game breaking glitches at launch sort of sealed its fate at the time.
It’s Is Rocksteady’s Fault Apparently
Initial reports stated that Warner Bros. forced Rocksteady to make this game a live service model. New reports had come out later claiming that Rocksteady was given the final decision on whether it should be live service or not, then Rocksteady execs themselves made the decision to continue with the live service model.
It should be noted that people loved the initial closed beta tests that were shared with a small group of people. However they had stated clearly that while the game is good mechanically, it would be a bad idea to put this game out in a live service model as there just wasn’t enough variety or anything that had the ability to peak a playerbase’s interest.
Time and time again executives think they can just introduce a live service title and players will be ready to jump ship at the very moment it releases. What they fail to understand is that live service games that are the most successful right now started off by being free from the beginning. Then they slowly start adding in content, game modes, skins and such all the while building up a community.
The Quick Decision To Wind Down Operations
Rocksteady had the initial plan to have long term community support for the game, meaning frequent updates, content drops and such but when they saw the reviews and backlash they had quickly pivoted to announcing that support would be on an ‘as needs’ basis which was till end of this year.
Those who bought the game will get to play it in offline mode as it is scheduled to be available as when the final fourth season drops with Deathstroke as the final member. This ‘episode’ as the content drops are labelled is scheduled to drop in January of next year after which there will be no content drops, updates or support available.
It is nice that those who bought can still enjoy the game after servers shut down and they will still be able enjoy the previous content drops and play with friends through peer-to-peer connections, something which even Ubisoft failed to do.
Good Riddance, Just Give Us Another Batman Game
It is a good thing for studios to try something that isn’t expected of them, that way they also learn and create something that is worthwhile and interesting if Suicide Squad was given the single player campaign development it could’ve performed way better that it did due to Rocksteady’s experience in crafting single player experiences.
But trying something new and at the same time marketing it as live service is possibly one of the worst ways to market any game let alone one made by such a venerated company. Hopefully these big triple-A studios now understand that making a live service requires more than developer manpower; it also requires dedication and the willingness to accept a few losses in the short term. Here’s to Rocksteady hopefully making another Batman game or any game that isn’t going down the treacherous road of live service.
