what happened suicide squad? Alex and I discuss in the video above that Rocksteady’s long-awaited return to the Arkhamverse is a disappointing departure from the formula that made them such a success story.
Of course, we don’t expect (or necessarily want) another Arkham game. The law of diminishing returns was in full force when Arkham Knight launched. Odd rumors about a Superman game or a Justice League game have spread in a similar fashion. How this will work is unclear, but it’s not hard to see how these initial ideas could have morphed into Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League over the better part of a decade.
Wherever we go, one thing is clear: The game is about five years late. Enthusiasm for superheroes in general is on the decline. We saw evidence of this with last year’s Marvel’s Midnight Sun: a fantastic game from a beloved studio that simply didn’t hit the numbers. Interestingly, based on what we’ve gleaned from reviews etc. about our own reporting, this is likely due to the fact that many people are feeling burned out on Marvel after countless years in the MCU (another prominent example) Diminishing returns, indeed in the case of Ant-Man’s recent box office debacle).
Yes, that’s Marvel, but people are even fed up with DC, whose failures and broken movie universe have been in trouble since the beginning. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is a rare bright spot, but as Alex said, the interpretation of the character is a little thin now.
So in those terms, a Suicide Squad adaptation coming out two years (or three, depending on your prospects) after that doesn’t seem like the surest proposition. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. With a genius like Rocksteady at the helm, and a killer concept of having to defeat an alien-owned Justice League, it could actually be something special. As long as they don’t do something stupid like turn it into a live service shooter and release it into a market full of live service shooters.
All fortunes are certainly being fueled by the quest to increase the dividend payout, rather than any creative decisions. Suicide Squad is, of course, debatable as a video game protagonist with distinct personalities and abilities. But from the gameplay we’ve seen, these are rarely utilized outside of cutscenes. King Shark shoots. Boomerang shooting gun. Harley shoots. Spraying bullets as a four-pack to glowing purple damage points is, frankly, tedious. About a million miles away from the faceted gameplay of the beloved Arkham games.
Not that field service shooters are inherently bad. They’re certainly not without success: Destiny and Warframe proved that the mod can be a huge hit, and were critically acclaimed for it. But online service games seem to be more noteworthy for the genre’s failure than its success, especially in a year when dozens of titles were dropped one after another due to apparent disinterest in the market.
Shareholders, however, are obsessed with trends. They demand growth, and since quality or innovation are risky bets to drive digital growth, the preferred way to meet growth needs is to throw a dart at the current list of buzzwords and doggedly pursue whatever it lands on. For a while, it was toy life. MOBAs. hero shooter. Long ago, it was a GTA clone. Whatever happened at the time, it wasn’t necessarily bad for creativity: some of the best games have come out of a talented studio who figured out how to cram concept Y into frame Z (The Simpsons Hit & Run , we never see it again).
But the current field service trend is such a bane, and so rude, it doesn’t even stay in its own driveway, like something bubbling around a corner that I can happily ignore. Because single-player games have long been predicted to die, as it becomes more profitable, as the vending machines that lure people into cosmetic hats cunningly disguised as co-op shooters, also begin to infect this nonsense. In the case of Suicide Squad, which I seriously doubt, basically robbed us of the Arkham follow-up, which in fact could have had its own version in the spirit of Arkham Asylum et al if it wasn’t for the publisher’s commercial needs that thing.
Warning: We haven’t played Suicide Squad yet. It could just be that they chose to show us the most underwhelming footage to date for some reason. Maybe it feels great to shoot. Maybe it’ll be a four-player co-op game that actually plays just as well in single-player mode. We’ll have to wait and see. But experience tells us that this can go bad, and the consequences will once again be painful for the industry as a whole.