No, ‘Suicide Squad’ Did Not Replace A Rocksteady Superman Game, Even If It Seems Like It – Forbes

Suicide Squad
This week, we saw 20 minutes of Suicide Squad footage and some explanations about its story and gameplay. I was not terribly impressed with what what shown, as I have not been with anything I’ve seen from this live service, loot-based offering. However, I will say that the sprawling Metropolis Rocksteady has created for this does look pretty cool. It’s also supposedly twice as big as the quite large Gotham in Arkham City.
One narrative that emerged from the reveal of the city was that Suicide Squad takes place in the “ruins of a Superman game,” that this Metropolis was built for a Superman game that was supposed to exist but was killed by greedy WB overlords.
One of the only people in the industry that would actually know about this is Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who chimed into one of these threads to kill the rumor.
Schreier says there is “zero truth” to this, this Rocksteady was never working on a Superman game, and in fact, did not even pitch one. Additionally, Schreier said that Suicide Squad, by the time it comes out, will have been in development for seven years, a very long time even in this AAA landscape.
As for how all this happened, and how we went from amazing single player Batman games to a questionable looking live service arcade shooter like Suicide Squad, that’s a more nuanced story. It does seem possible that Rocksteady, after three Batman games, wanted to branch out and do something different, hence the wildly different cast and gameplay here.
But it also seems like that the live service elements and battle passes and continued missions and new playable characters may have come from WB, given that WB has plainly stated outright they want to do more live service which is believed to be an easy way to print money. But, I also remember everyone thinking that Square Enix has forced Crystal Dynamics to make live service Avengers, but reports indicated they genuinely wanted to do it.
I do imagine Rocksteady is working hard on something they do actually want to make and make it well. Again, I have serious doubts about how this is going to go, as everything I’ve seen makes it look like a higher budget version of Crackdown with maybe some tinges of Sunset Overdrive, which I suppose could be a good thing. But I skeptical of the idea of say, Captain Boomerang being given a slate of guns to mainly use that are not…boomerangs, or King Shark using Gatling guns instead of biting people’s heads off.
I also have just seen this concept fail so many times. A great single player studio tries to go live service and bombs, but often it takes 2+ years of investment to fully fail. And given that this has already taken 7 years of Rocksteady’s time, I get how people would want them to have made some sort of great, Superman/Batman Beyond/Green Lantern/Flash/whatever game instead of this, rather than spending a decade on Suicide Squad. But we’ll see how it goes.
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