KitGuru Games: Rocksteady is making a huge mistake with Suicide Squad

While Destiny managed to find success and usher in the age of ‘live service' games, many other publishers have tried and failed to replicate that formula. While it seemed that Marvel's Avengers might have had a good shot, content exclusivity controversies, a lacking end-game and an empty post-launch roadmap meant that the game never found its feet. Now, I fear that Rocksteady is heading in the same direction with Suicide Squad.

Last week during a PlayStation State of Play stream, Rocksteady took up a good chunk of the show with Suicide Squad gameplay. The game will put players in the shoes of the Suicide Squad on a mission to stop the Justice League from destroying the world while under Braniac's control. If you've read any DC Injustice storyline or even played WB's Injustice games, this will feel like very familiar territory.

While Rocksteady made a name for itself with the Arkham Series, often touted as the best superhero games ever made, Suicide Squad is going in a very different direction. Unlike the Arkham games, Suicide Squad is not a single-player title, but is instead billed as an always-online game focused on multiplayer, but with solo play as an option.

Watching the gameplay footage is like watching history repeat itself. Much like Anthem and Marvel's Avengers, the trailers try to wow us with high-fidelity graphics and cinematic moments, but ultimately, the gameplay lacks impact.

Watching characters like Deathstroke and King Shark shoot small groups of enemies on rooftops, or purple splodges on helicopters doesn't feel distinctive and the shooting mechanics can be described as ‘floaty'. Metropolis is vibrant with colour, but the enemies lack variety and simply boil down to cannon fodder to keep you busy between major story moments.

Some variety will be added to the combat through gear sets, which can give you different buffs and debuffs. One example shown to us is a Bane set, which lets you use toxic sludge to slow enemies and make them explode. Killing enemies drops DOOM Eternal-style ammo and armour around the floor for you to collect.

I will give Rocksteady some credit for traversal and movement. Transitioning from air to ground combat and vice-versa appears very smooth and it looks like steps have been taken to ensure you feel fast and powerful while moving through the world, but it is nothing we haven't seen in other games. Rocksteady has gone from a studio that redefined superhero video games, and action games as a whole, to a studio chasing industry trends. Much like Marvel's Avengers, it looks like the company is resting a lot of its hopes for success on the DC license and character appearances, rather than on the strength of the gameplay and content.

This brings us to our next problem – post-launch content. Rocksteady says it plans to deliver “lots of new content” after launch, including new characters, weapons and more, for free. Monetisation will come in the form of a battle pass, intended to lock players into replaying whatever content is there for long periods of time to avoid missing out on certain cosmetics.

The different unlockable suits in the Arkham games were awesome, but things like that will now be locked behind a paywall. If players don't invest, then the scope of future content and updates will be scaled back, which results in more players moving on and leaving the game behind.

If players do invest, well then you are arguably in even bigger trouble. Destiny is perhaps the best example of a live service game, but it took Bungie years to get the game to the point it is at now. Destiny survives to this day because of its variety in repeatable content, ranging from campaign missions, to PvP, Dungeons, Raids, Strikes, Exotic Quests, Gambit, Patrol missions, seasonal events and more.

All of these modes get updates and there is a varied loop in place to maintain player interest. Are new characters and weapons in Suicide Squad going to keep players repeating the same content from the base game? Does Rocksteady have a Raid or Dungeon-level alternative? Is there a PvP or a competitive PvE mode in place?

Without such a wide range of content and updates to that content over time, maintaining a high player count and selling season passes for years on end is going to be a very difficult task. Given that even huge publishers have tried and failed to get this business model to work, it is more difficult to get players to initially invest, so you are stuck in a Catch-22 where you have to ‘prove' your capabilities at maintaining an interesting live service to grow the player base, but you also need a huge amount of players to buy-in from the get-go to justify the investment.

Games like Destiny and even F2P shooters like Warzone and Fortnite, also go through a huge yearly refresh, where everything is essentially reset for a new era. Does Rocksteady have ‘big refresh' ideas in the form of Suicide Squad expansions? Will there be new story arcs, as well as new world updates and additional content drops?

Nothing we have seen so far suggests that Rocksteady has any of those necessities lined up for a true live service, and as we saw with Marvel's Avengers, a big IP license can only carry you so far.

Ultimately, I think many Arkham fans are going to be disappointed with Suicide Squad. Rocksteady had a good thing going with its version of Gotham, and now we're trading all of that in to relive the Injustice storyline again, and again, and again, because this isn't a game designed with an ending in mind – no live service ever is. Based on what we've seen so far, this feels like a game designed to hit publisher monetisation goals rather than creative goals.

Once this game is out of the way, we can only hope that Rocksteady can return to its roots and deliver something a bit more compelling.

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KitGuru Says: We've still got a few months until Suicide Squad comes out and a lot of unanswered questions still linger. It feels like it may be too early to judge the game, but at the same time, we've seen this story play out before and watching that gameplay reveal largely felt like history repeating itself. 

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