In February, we will launch two games that clearly position themselves as ongoing live service games. The releases were exactly two weeks apart. Both games have taken longer to develop than you might expect, and certainly longer than usual for their respective teams. They were both delayed a few times, although one was clearly ahead of the other (and most games).
“Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” Released on February 2nd. Two Fridays later, Skull and Bones Next. But the perception of both games in the period leading up to release isn’t entirely consistent with what we’ve seen from similar games in the past.
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In fact, the problem is that it is difficult to determine Exactly Why is there such a cloud of negativity hanging over every game. Of course, we can go back and look at how players reacted to the reveal and draw a map of how emotions changed (or didn’t change) in the weeks and months since. We can even analyze which mistakes could have been avoided, or how certain things could have been communicated better, but none of this really leads to convincing conclusions.
No one wants any game to fail (especially since the brunt of any sales failure is felt by front-line developers, not the executives who made many of the decisions that led to the demise of their own products). But you can’t help but wonder if we’ve just reached “peak live service,” and these two games might have had a better chance five years or so ago.
Let’s start with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, an already bloated title that feels like a poetic foreshadowing of the game it’s attached to. Suicide Squad was always going to have a hard time selling its trailers (think Marvel’s The Avengers and the failure of its live-streaming service, for example).
This is a shooter from a studio that only makes a certain style of character action games. In fact, they were so good that they effectively laid out the blueprint for the genre that is still used today (and often for worse). But it’s not just the unexpectedness of its genre that turns people off, but its style. Suicide Squad looks exactly like what one would expect from a game from developer Rocksteady.
It takes place in an open-world version of a popular location from the comics – something we’ve never seen implemented in this way before. It’s played from the same third-person perspective. Its characters have the ability to travel and fight, all of which could easily be modeled after the Batman Arkham games (which still hold up 15 years later). But when you watch it in action, it suddenly becomes unrecognizable as a game made by the same developer. It’s like opening a pizza box and finding a salad bowl. It might be the best salad bowl ever, but the disappointment that it’s not pizza always overshadows the quality of what’s inside.
All of this is enough to make Suicide Squad’s chances scary, but Warner Bros. and Rocksteady also have to launch it as a live-service game, with support like new playable characters and new locations to come over the next few years. That was it, there was no turning back from that moment on.
Not just another unexpected addition for a game from a studio known for its single-player games, this revelation comes at a time when more and more of us are comfortable with the number of live service games out there emerge, and reject the few that are still being announced.
It’s also a matter of simple math; most of us have found a live service game of our choice. If you don’t care much about a movie, Suicide Squad is unlikely to be the one you spend most of your time in 2024.Never mind those games Flourish Play cooperatively with people you know, so someone on the team needs to fully advocate if there’s any chance of others following suit.
People just shoot the same four to six enemies over and over again in different environments and in different circumstances because they see the damage numbers flying off them while trying to get consistent shots at their weak points. What is it all for? Well, gear of course! and the never-ending pursuit of power. But none of that matters if you’re not willing to invest enough time into…anything important.
When media and content creators generally agreed that Suicide Squad’s gameplay wasn’t interesting enough to support the experience, Rocksteady made the highly unusual decision to cancel part of its NDA for its closed alpha. Just a few weeks ago. This is perhaps the most desperate I’ve ever seen a major studio go against the overwhelming (and undoubtedly shocking) rejection of audiences, and I doubt it adds any real “balance” to the conversation to justify it sex.
By comparison, Skull and Bones is a fairly benign attempt to make a live-service game using popular mechanics from one of the publisher’s past games. It almost feels like taking the surprisingly popular multiplayer mode from the Xbox 360/PS3 game and turning it into a standalone mode.
However, as in that example, this requires a Very Turnout was fast. It’s been in the oven for less than 10 years. Yes, people raved about Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag’s ship combat and navigation in 2013 and might have even demanded that the entire game be based on the same mechanics, but who wants that in 2024?
Ubisoft Singapore’s troubles developing Skull and Bones are believed to be the reason it took the studio so long (no pun intended) to launch the game, while missing out on multiple previous release dates. It’s clear that studio culture and leadership issues play a big role in this process.
But even without the developmental upheaval, Skull and Bones comes across as reheated fast food that somehow wants to compete with chef-prepared meals. Most will find it a simple single-player game, and the Black Flag mechanics have been expanded and deepened, but it’s launching in 2024, so it has to be a live-service game as well. It feels harsh for both games to face this kind of reckoning with live service games, but you have to admit it’s kind of funny that they get such similar reactions, and The drops were just two weeks apart.
Is this final proof that the real-time services trend has come to an end? Only time will tell.
