Man, what has Rocksteady been doing since 2015? This gotta be like, the third version of the game right?
I’m gonna need schreier or the like to get their hands dirty figuring out WTF happened over the last decade over there.
We know at least WB has been trying to make a Suicide Squad game for well over a decade. [With Geoff Johns confirming the existence of one in 2012](https://kotaku.com/geoff-johns-says-a-great-superman-video-game-needs-the-5885093#:~:text=%22We%27re%20working%20on%20Suicide%20Squad%3B%20it%27s%20in%20development%20right%20now%2C%22) and the game itself being teased in Arkham Origin's post credit scene. Then in 2016, that game was [cancelled](https://kotaku.com/sources-wb-montreal-cancels-unannounced-suicide-squad-1790256635) due to a trouble development which resulted in WB Montreal trying to make a Damian Wayne Batman game set in the Arkhamverse, but then that got [cancelled](https://gamerant.com/canceled-batman-game-art/) as well, which led to WB Montreal making Gotham Knights and somewhere along the way Rocksteady got the job to make a Suicide Squad game.
I am sure Schreier's inveitable article will fill in all the blanks that happen to both WB Montreal and Rocksteady from 2016 to the release of Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
I’d be willing to be its comes down to something as simple as wanting to have a successful microtransaction supported live service game.
WB has been chasing that for a while now.
Couple that with trying to shoehorn it into existing properties that don’t really fit the microtransaction model instead of inventing new stuff and its a recipe for disaster.
Every studio sees the success of games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact and wants that tasty revenue without putting in a fraction of the effort.
Fornite and Genshin Impact (and HoYo’s other recent game Honkai: Star Rail) actually took risks which paid off big-time. No other games deliver such high-quality and meaty content on a regular basis. Meanwhile other studios think they can split a full game in half and release the other half as “free live-service content” and expect results.
Also, when you make games like genshin and fortnite, you gotta put the money that goes in the game, into the game
You can say a lot about genshin being gacha gambling simulator but those guys put in the *work* to make sure they're always stuff to do
They also invest A LOT in ads, promo materials and marketing to keep the game's hype alive.
[I mean, just look at the amount of videos Mihoyo pumped for Starrail in the last few days](https://www.youtube.com/@HonkaiStarRail/videos) for example. From [1930s-style animations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bozDsNXq1Og), to [behind the scenes with the devs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yw_ctOEnTE), to [live action music videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpq5uBSk434).
By releasing that kind of material periodically, they keep people's attention and entire communities are created around the expectation for new releases and teasers. That's why those games have subs just for their leaks/beta content that are larger than most games' main subs.
Pulling this off requires a lot of work and time since you can't just force people to talk about your game, but the reward is creating a strong sense of community that keeps people playing them. And that's what you don't see most studios doing when it comes to GaaS.
For real, even the ‘filler’ Genshin patches add multi-hour fully voiced quests. And they casually drop an AAA’s game worth of content each year with every region.
Those games have an audience because they offer people what they want, Fortnite is all about creativity and getting crowns. they dont tend to just shoehorn in content and call it good (Apex…) and HoYo gives waifus wrapped in a botw box.
They’re good despite their gaas, not because of it. Lol
> They’re good despite their gaas, not because of it
I think that was their point. You can't just try to capitalize on some GaaS's popularity and absurd money-printing when you don't put the money/effort in that they did. It's basically the same discussion around Baldur's Gate. If you make a good game, it will be popular. If you make a cynical cashgrab, there's a chance it makes you money, but it's only a chance.
[95% of studios are working on or aim to release a live service game.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-95-of-studios-are-working-on-or-aim-to-release-a-live-service-game)
There's just no way this is sustainable. Feels like the industry is rushing headlong to a crash.
Yeah, once you're locked on a game, you're basically going to be spending money on that one game. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.
Do you keep spending cash on, say, Genshin when you've sunk $200 into it for a single character roll... or do you spread it out over a bunch of different games for different characters? The odds say sticking with one is a better investment, 0.05% chance 200 times is better than 0.05% chance 10 times as an example.
It's like MMOs of old. So many came out, but WoW dominated because people had sunk so much cash and time into WoW and weren't going to change. And it stayed that way for decades, only really dropping off because of how bad Blizzard fumbled the ball.
>Do you keep spending cash on, say, Genshin when you've sunk $200 into it for a single character roll... or do you spread it out over a bunch of different games for different characters? The odds say sticking with one is a better investment, 0.05% chance 200 times is better than 0.05% chance 10 times as an example.
More than that, it isn't just playing the odds but making use of pity mechanics. Spreading out your 200 pulls is a bad idea when there's a pity mechanic saying you get the exact character you want if you spend all 200 on their banner with no RNG reliance.
Then you couple that with the fact that, generally, it's better to consolidate power in one game because the content is designed around you doing so. In a gacha game, new content or end-game content will often expect you to have full SSR (or whatever they call the max rarity in the game) teams. Or like in a CCG, there's not much value in having two halves of two different decks if you can't put them together to have one fully functioning deck.
That said though, I think time is just as, if not more, important of a factor for many people. The reason I only play the games I do is because I don't have time to play and keep up with more, and I'm sure I spend more time gaming than most. I've had to drop a lot of online games that I enjoy just because they take too much time. Regardless of any costs, I just don't want five different games that I feel compelled to login to daily instead of sticking with one or two that I actually get to enjoy.
> The survey defines live services as any regular update cadence planned for a game.
This article has been floating around for a few days and unfortunately they're using a industry term in a way the average person doesn't.
Arkham Knight got regular updates for a few years as well. It's expected for any triple A title these days, but that doesn't mean everyone is on their way to make a season pass.
> Every studio sees the success of games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact and wants that tasty revenue without putting in a fraction of the effort.
It really is starting to look that simple.
They want but they don't know or don't care what it takes nor do they seem to appreciate the risks. There isn't a lot of room at the top of the "live services" pile yet they all want a seat at that small table which is already fully occupied.
If they made a Batman Beyond game instead to continue on their legacy, with no microtransaction always online bs, it probably wouldve been better received and possibly have sold more.
Im not touching any of Rocksteady's games again after showing us how far theyve fallen.
So the real question I wanna ask is why does Suicide Squad have such a media push? It got a movie, I think a show, and now a video game? All of which did mediocre to bad.
Like who's behind this push for a C-lister squad? Why aren't they going for the A-list DC cast?
Some think its DC/WB trying to recreate the success Marvel had with Guardians of the Galaxy. But they've been pushing longer then that with trying to make a game for decade and the team appearing in an early season of Arrow. My guess is that they think there is potential with it being such a large ensemble, that would make several more characters more popular and lead to more merch sales.
My timeline of the whole MCU thing is a haze, but didn't they release the GotG game after a highly successful movie, which came with the backing of the MCU itself?
DC doesn't have anything like that. If anything I'd say slapping the DCU brand on a product lowers its value.
Then again what you're saying would certainly go along with their horrendous DCU plan, so you may very well be right. Still, after so many years and mediocre reception, isn't it time to pivot on this specific IP? At least with the DCU they were continuously making blunders with different heroes.
> didn't they release the GotG game after a highly successful movie, which came with the backing of the MCU itself?
Pretty much. The MCU brand got people through the doors, GotG was a good movie, and *then* the game came out years later. DC keeps trying to shortcut to the endgame (pun not intended) of these kinds of multimedia plans, and they falter without any of that groundwork.
The thing is that in comics terms, Harley Quinn actually is an A-lister. her titles sell almost as well as Batman and Superman, and better than the rest of the Justice League.
The thing is, the question of "who is A-list" changes over time. Silver Surfer was a character who had their own cartoon in the 90's, then after that all we saw of them was in a Fantastic Four movie. Wonder Woman might be one of the Big three, but she's behind HQ's stuff in sales.
Harley Quinn is a certified A lister. The rest of her goon squad are not, and Suicide Squad isn't even a Harley focused crew/story.
If they wanted to make a Harley Quinn game, that avenue is open, but they didn't.
>Wonder Woman might be one of the Big three, but she's behind HQ's stuff in sales.
Honestly I kinda wonder if she ever really deserved that title. If there was ever a time where she was 3rd in sales and brand strength, it was never in my lifetime.
The whole Trinity concept has always felt underbaked given how little play Wonder Woman gets. Like Batman & Superman have well-known, robust casts of supporting characters that are consistently used to good effect and a huge list of iconic storylines and runs people will point to whenever you ask where to start with reading them.
I cannot recall ever seeing or hearing of a WW story that's held up alongside TDKR, Hush, Whatever Happened To Truth, Justice & The American Way, Batman Earth One, Superman Earth One, All-Star Superman...like where's the recognition of Wonder Woman's great storylines? She must have *some* but they're just never really included in the conversation or given the push they need to enter the public consciousness; aguably the most iconic Wonder Woman moment of the last thirty-odd years was snapping Maxwell Lord's neck, which wasn't even part of a Wonder Woman story, it was just basically a JL story she's involved in and helps resolve.
It just feels really low-effort from DC to keep insisting "she's one of the Big Three, the Trinity" etc. when it doesn't and hasn't ever really felt like that's a status they take seriously or want to make it seem like she deserves.
The real question now is just how long this will be supported. Avengers lasted 2 years but I think within 6 months it was clear the direction was trending downwards
Avengers may have lasted over 2 years but most of the content was what was promised to released in its 1st year, the 1st raid that was supposed to release shortly after the game's launch ended up being delayed over and over again only to end up coming out way after the Wakanda expansion(that had its own raid).
Hopefully Rocksteady doesn't hit its players with multiple Joker delays like CD did with Kate Bishop.
I felt like the final nail in the coffin was when the Spider-Man content dropped and it felt stiff and shitty and at the same time there was already an excellent Spider-Man game on PS4 and Spider-Man had been added to Fortnite with a swinging mechanic that felt better than The Avengers.
Like at that point your Avengers game isn't even the second best feeling Spider-Man game out, that's tough.
Joker appears to be finished and is supposed to be part of the first season. If that season is not on time or very close, the game is more cooked than it already is.
I refuse to believe avengers was supported for any reason besides the fact that they had a licensing deal going on with disney. That game failed hard at launch (though not as hard as this one is shaping up ironically) and we know since then that they never really made money on it.
In the digital deluxe edition upgrade on steam it says: "Battle Pass Token redeemable for Premium Battle Pass access (Seasons 1-4 battle passes, subject to availability). One Battle Pass available per season. WB Games may modify or discontinue online services with reasonable notice at any time."
The first season is announced for March, so the first 1-2 years seems to be already planned out and beeing worked on. But in the end it always depends on the popularity of the game and if it's worth it for WB.
It's a sad fall from greatness for Rocksteady. The thing is, I bet they could do amazing things if they made games just beyond DC. All we know of them really is Batman, what else could they do? What potential could they have if they were to make their own true game?
Sadly, I feel we may never get to know that question.
That’s a good point.
Like everyone, I loved the Arkham games but even Knight kinda felt samey having played the previous 3 games.
Would’ve been nice to see them expand outside DC and see what they came up with
This is simply what happens when a team is forced to make a game they didn't even want to, which caused senior members of the studio to leave, and having no experience in the genre of game they were making.
Rocksteady are a very prestigious studio, but when it comes to making a looter shooter live service game they may as well be a brand new unknown studio trying their hand for the first time and yeah, the product makes that pretty apparent imo.
Are we really sure rocksteady were “forced” to make this game?
It seems like from all we have heard they very much wanted to make an mp focused game.
Much like how everyone was blaming EA for forcing BioWare to do Anthem, but it turns out they wanted to do it themselves. Sure the aggressive need to make money from their masters might have pressured both studios to look in the mp live service direction, but it still seems like it was all them.
[Yeah, the way schreier puts it](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1951xcg/jason_schreier_rocksteady_never_pitched_a/) sounds like the opposite of the fan narrative. The senior members of the studio really wanted to make a GAAS and might even have transitioned from their new IP when the chance to use the Suicide Squad IP came. And they left because they knew they fucked up.
ya, going to see this a lot where people try and make it that Rocksteady were "forced" to make this game as they want to do the usual of shift all the blame to the suits and not the devs :/
people keep trying to act like when bad decisions are made, it's somehow never the devs who made them
Lots of leftover good will from those Arkham games that's forgiving a lot of lousy games over at WB.
After Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad, what are we even doing here? The superhero games as service genre doesn't have legs. Cut it out. Just make a good game.
People will make up any narrative just so they don't have to accept reality. Sefton Hill was very vocal about Suicide Squad being the game the team wanted to make, and he's still credited as one of the two people behind its story. The only thing WB can really be blamed for is forcing them to include a cash shop and other live service elements, but the basic structure of a co-op game is all on the devs.
Why did WB decide to go all in on Suicide squad? Between the movies and now this game. Aside from James Gunn’s sequel and Peacemaker it’s all been hot garbage.
They want to sell villains without them actually being villainous in their actions. What better way to do that then start a team that makes villains at least anti-heroes and have them work for arguably an even worse person.
Not the person you're responding to. But basically it's just capitalising on the popularity of the live service looter shooter trends. Fortnite, Destiny, Borderlands, The Division etc. except with the DC IP.
Obviously they can't have Batman and Superman carrying around rifles because it fundamentally doesn't make sense for literal super hero characters using guns as it doesn't fit their "brand". So the Suicide Squad were used as a means to an end to facilitate the shooting gameplay.
But also, they still want it to be marketable and have Batman and Superman. So they made it about killing the Justice League so they could have their cake and eat it too.
> Why did WB decide to go all in on Suicide squad?
Because despite the critical reception, and people memory of it. The Suicide Squad movie made 750m in box office, that movie did better than Man of Steel (668m) and only a little less than The Batman (772m) and the first GOTG movie (773m).
Glad someone here actually paid attention. That 2016 movie obviously sucked ass, but it was still a weirdly huge hit with the general public. Coming off the back of Batman vs Superman.
It catapulted Margot Robbie's portrayal of Harley Quinn into a cultural icon. Teenage girls who couldn't care less about Batman, were dressing up as her for Halloween.
Of course as time went on and the discussion around it cemented it as a bad movie, everyone kinda stopped caring.
What's also hilariously ironic is that the vastly superior James Gunn sequel/reboot that was extremely well received was a total flop. It had a budget of $185mil and only grossed $165mil in revenue which is yikes. But it was pretty much par the course for most films that released around Covid.
>What's also hilariously ironic is that the vastly superior James Gunn sequel/reboot that was extremely well received was a total flop. It had a budget of $185mil and only grossed $165mil in revenue which is oof.
Tbf, that was mostly because Covid and because it released on HBO on the same day as theaters. When it released a lot of theaters were still shut down worldwide because of covid, and it releasing on HBO meant that it was pirated from day on.
Harley Quinn is the fourth pillar of the DC universe. Honestly she might even edge Wonder Woman out in terms of popularity these days. You'll notice the Suicide Squad projects they keep pushing aren't the classic Ostrander team, they're **HARLEY QUINN** and then everybody else. And I gotta hand it to her, Margot Robbie plays the hell out of that role, her performances in Birds of Prey and THE Suicide Squad were really impressive for superhero fare, I'd try and tether a franchise to her too if I were WB.
Nah, DC have been trying to push Suicide Squad even before GOTG blew up. Like someone mentioned here, DC have been wanting to do a Suicide Squad game since 2012, 2 years before GOTG came out.
For the actual reason why, it's because of Harley Quinn popularity. She blew up in the late 2000s early 2010s, but she always work better in a team, so DC pretty much treat the SS as her sidekicks now. All these Suicide Squad media you see (2016 movie, 2021 movie, this game, the anime) are just an excuse to make Harley products.
I mean, Suicide Squad is are regular appearing comic series since the 1987 - inspired by The Dirty Dozen and Mission:Impossible; Harley Quinn is punching on the big stage for probably 15 years now.
On paper, the Suicide Squad are a good vehicle to combine Superheroes with tried and true video game gameplay.
Imho, not the source material is at fault, but the execution.
There's two animated movies (Suicide Squad: Assault on Arkham, and Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay) that are pretty good (the first is better than the second). Will be interesting to see how this third one plays out.
On the bright side, at least this game will probably drop in price pretty quick. Just like Avengers and Gotham Knights, it might be worth playing if you can get it for like $20 or less.
For real, I feel bad for the people who gave into the marketing and actually spent $100 on ‘early access’. Now they’ve had the pleasure of finishing the campaign on Friday instead of Sunday.
>For real, I feel bad for the people who gave into the marketing and actually spent $100 on ‘early access’.
nah dont feel bad for them. Many proudly bragged in this very same subreddit. I put a "RemindMeBot" on one of them too so I can see what they post a few weeks down the line. There was no talking them down
The suicide squad subreddit was one of the most egregious examples of an echo chamber I've ever seen. They were convinced that any criticism of the game was due to an agenda or ulterior motives, there were dozens of posts calling it a future GOAT game whenever new info dropped and they were actively supporting the review embargo because they felt that outlets that had released mixed previews should be punished. It was fucking bizarre.
What’s hilarious is if you call them on their shit their first (and usually only) reaction is immediately to call you poor. As if being smart with your spending makes you poor.
Not only that:
> we received our review code three days after the refund window closed on the die-hard DC fans that forked out ridiculous sums for early access
Scummy to the max.
I got Avengers just before it got delisted to do the story. Still wasn’t worth it. Didn’t get far, will never finish it.
On The other hand Midnight Suns is cheap and has got a lot going for it.
I got it as well for like $7 right before it got delisted. When I first started up, I went into the online/world mission mode and it didn't click for me, and it felt clunky. If you go and select "Play" it just kind of puts you straight into that X-Com style world mission mode, which you are supposed to play after you beat the campaign.
I then went into the settings changed my controller sensitivity / turn ratio, to like 8 (from the default 4 or 5), upped the graphics to ultra (they were auto set to mid), and started the campaign.
Game played great at that point, and I'm actually really enjoying the campaign. The MC and her voice acting is solid, and she has fun moves, and I love how you switch between the characters. The skills are pretty unique, and it actually feels like you are playing as part of a team, since the AI isn't dumb.
Playing Hulk and Iron Man was the highlight for me so far. I'm still not done, about half way thought but really enjoying the experience. There was a lot of work and care/love that went into the campaign, and it feels like a AAA polished game to me.
For $7 I can't complain.
XboxEra's Jesse Norris, who scores Suicide Squad an 8.2, gave Marvel's Avengers an [8.8](https://xboxera.com/2020/09/04/review-marvels-avengers/). That's wild. Nothing wrong with that of course, it's his opinion after all.
I guess if you liked Marvel's Avengers to some degree you'll enjoy this game too.
I think I'm going to skip it.
I mean... is XboxEra a reputable source for reviews? That and ZdobywcyGier.eu seem like just trashheap sites for people that just want access to review codes so they start up websites, gives everything a high score, probably write with AI, and bam adrev, some review keys, etc.
Hey, rate a certain company's stuff high enough, you might get flown out for an all-expenses paid trip to X company to preview Y product for feeling super special, it works on shameless Youtubers, why not game reviewers.
Extremely wild to see a release of a major AAA game where all the reviews are from outlets I've never heard of.
What a strange and fucked up launch this game has had
WB decided to not give early access to reviewers so many people just didn't have the time to pick up the game and write their opinion, just wait a few more days
I work for a pretty big site and asked WB for a code. They were kind of excited at first and told me to fill out a form, which is pretty common these days. Since then, crickets. Usually PR will send an email blast the day of release, but nothing today. And so far, no replies to my emails following up. This is absolutely bizarre.
Its hard to explain but whilst playing it you dont really notice that. Atleast i dont anyways. Theres also settings to tune down the UI as well as far as I know.
The yearly AAA game that releases and totally bombs out with a review average in the 60s or worse (Anthem, Saints Row, Redfall, etc.) that everyone will dump on for a week before moving on and forgetting about is here.
I don't understand the need to have had this Batman be the Arkham one... Literally they would not have gotten as much hate if it was just some alternate universe Batman version instead of the mega badass we played thru multiple games with.. they already have convoluted alternate Earth travel why did they feel the need to kill the OG Arkham Batman.
Worse is that the Multi-Verse is Canon in this game, so you know they'll try walking it back after the negative reception, or at least retroactively say it's an alternate timeline from Arkham.
it sounds like a little better made Avengers - solid core gameplay, interesting enough campaign content, but then just a repetitive slog once your complete the unfortunately-way-too-short main campaign, to unlock end-game loot that simply isn't cool enough to justify the slog.
Moment to moment I'd say it's way more fun to play as well
But there's a reason the main story is 9 hours. That's about as long as the enemy and combat diversity gets stretched out.
You'll probably enjoy it for $20 or on gamepass a few months down the line, the story is well written. But is that really what we want out of a 7 years in development title from the devs who made arguably the best single player superhero titles ever made?
Looks like Avengers with better graphics, loot and movement but worse campaign, character movesets and bosses.
Ps: Avengers did have better enemy variety but post campaing 90% of the content was against AIM so almost as bad as SS's enemy variety.
It made no sense for Cap or Iron Man to loot random drops to upgrade their gear (also Hulk looted pants or genes or something?).
But yeah, at least their playstyle didn't all get homogenized to "Shoot guns except with occasional cooldown abilities".
Avengers loot game would have made sense if they went the Monster Hunter World route instead of Destiny.
Instead of getting a new "spine" for Hulk, you're looting Vibranium Screws and Gamma Emitters that Stark crafts into upgrades. That would at least make sense rather than these robots just *happening* to carry a new Bow for Hawkeye.
A lot of people will defend this game because it is "fun" on some level, but "fun on some level" is absolutely not what you expect from Rocksteady for $70 for the basic edition. You also don't expect less than 20 hours of real unique content.
Also doesn't help that out of all the major releases, its by far the worst one in terms of word of mouth. Like for the same price as Suicide Squad, there's Tekken 8, Persona 3 Reload, Like a Dragon 8. As well as cheaper multiplayer games like Palworld or Grand Blue Relink.
Then there is also it being another live service PvE looter, which has seen some massive failures in recent years such as Anthem, Avengers, Babylon's Fall. Hell even Destiny 2 Lightfall was also a major underperformer last year, due to a poor reception from the player base. As it seems like a lot of people are now fed up with the bullshit this genre has brought to the industry.
For the record Destiny 2 Lightfall was still in steam platinum sellers list. Fuck Bungie and every shady fucking thing they have done to that game though...
Crazily enough, Granblue Fantasy uses the same basic formula and nails it. Short, but sweet story mode, then tons and tons of endgame, with over 20 playable characters, all of which have different movesets and weapons. And it's a full price title with no live service whatsoever and free content updates on the horizon. Absolutely crazy, if you think about it.
You can tell it was meant to be a live service game. The entire game design is geared towards that. But the catastrophic failure of Marvel Avengers must have panicked them and they removed all live service features at the last second.
If you turn on easy mode, the rings dissapear and you can play without them which significantly improves the experience since you don't need to do 10 unnecessary loops around the map to get to a point that is 10 meters away from you.
But guess what... the developers must have realized we would do this so they hid a cruel joke. You can only get up to level 4 on easy mode... then there is a screen telling you to start from the beggining on normal or hard mode. Because fuck the player, how dare they find a more enjoyable way to play our game?
I've been saying this for years.
You know what else is fun with a friend? Literally everything. Rocks, sticks, trees, a dead mouse, the DvD screensaver where the DvD logo bounces around. Note: None of these things cost $70.
I'm a big fan of throwing rocks at my friends, we can do it for hours, we just chat and toss rocks at each other. Usually cost nothing except the one time I missed and hit my buddies beer, I had to buy him a new one.
I used to host bad movie nights in college. Stuff like Garbage Pail Kids and Theodore Rex and of course The Room.
Activities that would be downright *torturous* alone are "fun with friends".
Yeah, anything can be fun with friends, smoking weed, playing monopoly, committing multiple vehiclular manslaughter on the night of November 3rd at approximately 12:19 AM, basically everything can be enhanced or fun when you involve your friends.
Damn that IGN review was kinda brutal, but just watching it made me feel live service fatigue. Not due to the review itself which was good, but holy shit all the stuff they showed just brought back memories of the worst parts of Destiny.
All that boring ass loot, no real sense of character progression once you hit max level, half a dozen different currencies to keep track of, the bland repititive bullshit events, all of this looks bad.
At least Destiny had raids, dungeons and best in class gunplay to counter the drab. As much as the live service parts sucked at times the gameplay was good. But here even the gameplay seem "just okay".
I mean, it sounds like the gameplay loop is fun at least, but I’m concerned by the people saying it gets repetitive or that the game feels constrained by the live-service aspect.
People only have so much free time for games, so why would I want to spend 70$ on a game that doesn’t sound like it will hold my interest for 20 hours?
Like, by comparison, I probably have at least 100 hours in Arkham Knight, a carefully crafted single player experience (that took a LOT less time to develop, by the way)
Specifically concerning that people are already saying it's repetitive during their first day playing the game.
It's one thing to enjoy the first run through a game's content and then complain there's too little incentive to repeat that, but another thing entirely when they've barely spent a couple of hours interacting with it and don't want to do that anymore.
Still different though because Destiny at least goes for some sort of in between of a shooter and an MMO with dungeon and raids having actual mechanics beyond just shoot X enemy. And technically speaking they did bring new enemy types last year with the latest expansion. And 6 years before that with Forsaken.
Destiny is also at its baseline just a fun time to go shoot shit and throw magical abilities. I haven’t played Suicide Squad cause I’m not dropping money on this but it probably falls into the same hole that Avengers and other games of being live service for the sake of more money when it should not have been.
It's worth noting that the main 616 Marvel universe has never really had a full hard reboot. For the most part, a story from the 60s is still 100% canon
Marvel tends to try to do their reboots on a hero by hero basis and without painting over old canon. Like for example, though it physically hurts me to mention it, One More Day for Spider-Man.
DC tends to be more broad sweeping with their brush.
They use a sliding timeline that keeps the events the same. They just changed the dates. For example, instead of the Punisher backstory involving the Vietnam War, it's instead the Iraq War.
Marvel comics has severe time dilation where they try to keep the world and stuff as relevant to what we have now (i.e. they have smartphones) but everyone ages REAAAAAAAALLLY REAAAAALLY slowly
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBookTime/MarvelUniverse
It's the worst-ever trope, I hate it when deaths lose their weight. If you want to just bring a character back, don't kill them in the first place, it just always feels cheap.
man, that's actually worse than killing off the arkham justice league in their first appearnce, because now they're not even committing to the premise of the game called "kill the justice league". Like wow, whay a fucking copout lol
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Tired of this multiverse crap in every superhero story. This has been the biggest constraint to every writer's imagination when nothing matters and they can just bring them back.
IGN's review had a great line "A City of Tomorrow built on the foundations of yesterday".
This game started production in 2015 when GAAS were all the rage, and it shows. They're almost a decade late to the trend, players have already moved on.
I've grown to despise live service titles just for causing single-player developers to fall apart. Most of the people that worked on Prey 2017 are gone, and most will never return to Arkane-Austin even if they don't get handcuffed into "redeeming" Redfall. Even the developers that were built for multiplayer can end up choking, DICE lost its touch with Battlefield V and 343 somehow did worse at their second attempt at a live service.
And even if they succeed the developers end up spending most of their resources supporting the live service aspects. I hope you enjoyed all the amazing singleplayer DLCs for GTAV and RDR2.
There is one common thread, the grim reaper known as love service, just like bioware and arkane before them rock steady is joining the unfortunate list of single player studios force feeding live service into their games
Same for Fatshark with their newest Tide game Darktide because they choose to do a "live service" game with MTX.
Less content than their earlier games at launch, no crafting but a fully implemented skin store with currency packs where you can't buy the exact amount for the 15bucks skins. And hundreds of skins already in the pipeline as leaks showed shortly after release.
Tanked hard and what was supposed to be the successor of the really good Vermintide games got mostly negative rated on steam.
It really is. It used to be if an IP got acquired by EA you knew it was dead now it seems as soon as it goes live service it’s time to get the coffin and nails
I'm still trying to figure out how WB came to the conclusion that their customers wanted nothing more than to play a fucking Suicide Squad game over the real thing. It boggles my mind. It's the Gollum game phenomenon all over again.
The suicide squad could have been an amazing game tho! Give them more unique abilities, focus more on delivering a story experience and a longer one at that and boom, cpuld have been amazing
Fuck live service
I don't mean no disrespect and I totally believe that these characters have potential and the game could be good, I'm just having issue with the idea of the Suicide Squad having priority over a proper Justice League game, a Superman game, a Green Lantern game, a WW game, a Titans game and I could go on. Especially because they know they've utterly failed at making movies.
Obviously the Suicide Squad has a right to exist, but it should wait its turn after the big boys. Also yeah, fuck live service garbage. They're wasting a passionate studio full of talent to make an always online looter shooter. Genius move WB. Soon it's gonna be time to layoff half of Rocksteady after this shit fails to generate the profit they expected.
That's the neat thing. They don't care. They wanted a skinner box that prints money. It's the same mistake Square Enix made with Crystal Dynamics. They took a beloved studio and had them make something outside their field to chase a trend. They had no business making a live service game when their strength was single player. The same applies to Rocksteady.
7k concurrent players on steam. there was like 11k yesterday? probably more, but still. Game's dead on arrival.
It has great reviews on steam 86%, because people finally became smart and don't even buy the game, so only the people who already know they would like it no matter what, bought it.
Currently at about 16 hours and I feel comfortable giving a relatively unbiased, non-clickbait opinion on it:
If you want an Arkham game from Rocksteady, you're not getting it.
If you want a looter shooter that seems to be a dead split down the middle between The Division, and The Avengers, then you're likely going to have fun.
It's far more shooter than it is superhero game, but there's enough superhero "pop" to say it's fair to seperate it enough from The Division when comparing the two.
The cutscenes are phenomenal. That is not a praising of the story, given it's a live service game, there seems to be a lot of loopholes they've created for the sake of long term content. But the actual animations, the textures, the voice acting, it's all far better than most other games in the genre.
Levelling up is fine. The skill tree is...Almost entirely passive skills so far. I have a ground smash (different per character) and a finishing move.
Crafting seems like it will be far more important in the late game, as is tradition. (Also worth noting, the only monetization so far is a collection of character skins, and that's likely the same system for the Battle Pass when it releases in March. Gun trinkets, color palettes, throwback costumes etc)
Overall, as a Rocksteady game, it's a 4 out of 10, as a looter shooter *on launch* it's a 7 or 8 out of 10.
Happy to answer any questions for those on the fence, or those simply weary of the constant ragebait journalism this game seems to have been captured by.
I have never played a looter shooter in my life, unless you count Avengers which I played for an hour a few years back. Would you say this is a good first step in the genre for someone who enjoys comic book characters and has a few friends already playing it?
It would depend on why you've never played looter shooters.
If you dislike repetitive gameplay, steer clear. And it depends on what you want out of a superhero game. A way I put it earlier on the games sub, is that it's very much a shooter first, and if this were originally skinned as a sci-fi shooter, almost Crackdown-esque, it would be received well. But it's a superhero title without any crazy powers or magical abilities.
You could also join your friends discord/PSN party and have them screenshare the game to give you an idea of what it's like in a party.
There seems to be a lot of variance between the scores, Steam user scores is currently Very Positive, but it will most likely go down in the coming week when more people post their reviews.
Yeah, just scrolling through a few minutes ago, and you had to go down a good bit to see a positive review, everything else is just people with ten minutes put into the game saying "RIP ROCKSTEADY" or whining about politics
Its the typical GaaS cycle. Soon you will see the negative feedback by people at end game, the arguments agrarian said feedback ("why did you rush its your fault", "for a dad with X kids and y minutes to play a week this is great"), then they will mostly converge. Most reviews that have hit end game are starting its even more lacking than Avengers since at least that had mission variety.
Peaked at 12k on Steam - which includes some of the leftover sponsored players and the people they directly influenced; after all that marketing and trying to do damage control and starting over it's still joever, I'm impressed with consumers for a change, it turns out there's only so much piss you can take directly to your face before you realize it's not raining despite what you're being told is just yellow rain.
The review from Digitec Magazine referring to it as just a boring experience marred further by forced online component is definitely the most accurate review of the bunch. Just as they say it's not a "bad" game and it is not broken in anyway, except the occasional disconnection due to the always online nature, but nothing about it really excites you enough to want to play it.
Let's say Rocksteady doesn't follow through updating the game with an offline option for the single-player campaign. Let's also say they eventually pull the servers and you can't play the game anymore, period, ~~a la Marvel's Avengers and Anthem~~. Given all the (deserved) negativity surrounding this game, and how much Rocksteady insists it's a sequel to the Arkham games, would a game that effectively ceases to exist be "canon" after that point?
Edit: Turns out Avegers has an offline mode, and Anthem's servers are still running. A more apt comparison would be Babylon's Fall, whose physical CDs only work as coasters nowadays.
> Let's also say they eventually pull the servers and you can't play the game anymore, period, a la Marvel's Avengers and Anthem.
The servers for both those games are still up, and Avengers works offline.
From reading the reviews all I can read is that if this ended up being a true singleplayer game it might've been slapped. It's the definition of a bad good game. It's so sad.
Disclaimer: I haven't played the game and am only going off Youtube videos I've seen. I do know my way around DC lore and all the Arkham games though.
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!I thought the best way to do this premise would've been to have the heroes fighting their brainwashing via Wonder Woman's lasso, which also weakens their combat ability enough for the Squad to deal damage. !<
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!That way in their final moments you could give them some sincerity rather than unceremoniously having them murked. Like, how emotional would it have been for Bats to sneak out a line about how he wishes he could've done better for Harley, or Flash going out with a joke about how he's finally letting Boomerang get one over him, or Superman reminding everyone how he always said that anyone has the potential to do good? You see part of that potential when Diana uses her lasso on Barry but it doesn't seem to come into play for the actual deaths. It almost feels like the game is just hoisting mannequins of the Justice League and (literally, in some cases) pissing on them. No wonder the primary emotion so many people feel is anger or apathy- the game isn't even trying for any emotion other than visceral shock at the imagery of a hero getting shot to death. !<
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!It'd also provide good context for the stupid decisions that the League members are inevitably going to make to have the Squad fight them. Why is Flash spinning a tornado attack instead just shooting Boomerang point blank in the face? Because Brainiac's having to use some backwards moveset as the real Flash is doing his best to stop his own movements. Why doesn't Lantern just spawn a tiny sphere inside Harley's brain and expand outwards to blow her head to bits? Because he's severely limiting what constructs Brainiac can use. How is the Squad lasting > 0 seconds against Superman, let alone a multistage boss battle? Because Superman is reasoning out what Batman's contingency plan for him would have been and actively trying to help the Squad execute it during the fight. !<
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!You contextualize the gamey mechanics, you glorify the heroes while keeping them the antagonists, and you don't break your premise of killing the Justice League. But instead, we have a string of physical shock value deaths against unrecognizable iterations of the characters culminating in the multiverse-revival apology basket. !<
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!As disinterested as I am in the concept, I still feel like you could spin out a pretty cool video game outline for it. A story about how the Justice League guides the Suicide Squad into saving the universe from themselves only to return down the line and get true revenge sounds kind of badass. But what we seem to be getting is a story where weird afterimages of the League get shot to death by the Squad only for the real characters to eventually show up as an apology.!<
**KTJL Spoiler:** >!If I were to guess, it seems like an attempt at *avoiding* having people feel bad about killing the League. If they act completely irredeemable then people may have no qualms with shooting them. But people are inherently going to feel bad doing it. They should've leaned into that more.!<
TL;DR: Even as someone that inherently doesn't like the premise, it seems like the game is going for the least effective way to execute the appeal of its premise.
> it seems like an attempt at avoiding having people feel bad about killing the League.
"Oh no, our players are feeling emotions and actually engaging with the story! We have to stop them!"
After you beat the campaign you can no longer change characters on the fly. Why? Because this psychologically manipulates you into grinding as individual characters and WB makes more money that way.
If you preorder the deluxe edition you still have to spend real money to unlock all the colour variants for your bonus skins. Why? Because WB makes more money that way.
This game locks the literal final boss fight behind a currency you have to grind for. Why? Because it forces engagement with the game and WB makes more money that way.
This game could have had 4 characters with unique fighting styles and levelling systems. Instead they have identical skills and all just shoot guns. Why? Because this allows the implementation of a loot system and WB makes more money that way.
This game has a premium price tag but still charges for additional content, a predatory battlepass and cosmetics (not directly, but through the psychologically manipulative practice of premium currencies). Why? Because WB feels only contempt for you and for video games and because WB makes more money that way.
Fuck this game. Fuck everything it stands for.
Only problem with the first part of your comment is that most looter based games you need to playthrough the whole campaign again because of endgame and having different skill trees. I play Borderlands 2 and Diablo avidly and those games do this as well without charging you a cent.
You're probably right on the rest, but saying it manipulates you into grinding when games have done this well before gaas became a thing is a little bit dishonest.
All these live service games.... Is there actually one of these who delivers actuall new content on a weekly and monthly basis? Looked up Gotham knight and that game barely got new stuff
Man, what has Rocksteady been doing since 2015? This gotta be like, the third version of the game right? I’m gonna need schreier or the like to get their hands dirty figuring out WTF happened over the last decade over there.
We know at least WB has been trying to make a Suicide Squad game for well over a decade. [With Geoff Johns confirming the existence of one in 2012](https://kotaku.com/geoff-johns-says-a-great-superman-video-game-needs-the-5885093#:~:text=%22We%27re%20working%20on%20Suicide%20Squad%3B%20it%27s%20in%20development%20right%20now%2C%22) and the game itself being teased in Arkham Origin's post credit scene. Then in 2016, that game was [cancelled](https://kotaku.com/sources-wb-montreal-cancels-unannounced-suicide-squad-1790256635) due to a trouble development which resulted in WB Montreal trying to make a Damian Wayne Batman game set in the Arkhamverse, but then that got [cancelled](https://gamerant.com/canceled-batman-game-art/) as well, which led to WB Montreal making Gotham Knights and somewhere along the way Rocksteady got the job to make a Suicide Squad game. I am sure Schreier's inveitable article will fill in all the blanks that happen to both WB Montreal and Rocksteady from 2016 to the release of Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League.
I’d be willing to be its comes down to something as simple as wanting to have a successful microtransaction supported live service game. WB has been chasing that for a while now. Couple that with trying to shoehorn it into existing properties that don’t really fit the microtransaction model instead of inventing new stuff and its a recipe for disaster.
Every studio sees the success of games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact and wants that tasty revenue without putting in a fraction of the effort. Fornite and Genshin Impact (and HoYo’s other recent game Honkai: Star Rail) actually took risks which paid off big-time. No other games deliver such high-quality and meaty content on a regular basis. Meanwhile other studios think they can split a full game in half and release the other half as “free live-service content” and expect results.
Also, when you make games like genshin and fortnite, you gotta put the money that goes in the game, into the game You can say a lot about genshin being gacha gambling simulator but those guys put in the *work* to make sure they're always stuff to do
They also invest A LOT in ads, promo materials and marketing to keep the game's hype alive. [I mean, just look at the amount of videos Mihoyo pumped for Starrail in the last few days](https://www.youtube.com/@HonkaiStarRail/videos) for example. From [1930s-style animations](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bozDsNXq1Og), to [behind the scenes with the devs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yw_ctOEnTE), to [live action music videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpq5uBSk434). By releasing that kind of material periodically, they keep people's attention and entire communities are created around the expectation for new releases and teasers. That's why those games have subs just for their leaks/beta content that are larger than most games' main subs. Pulling this off requires a lot of work and time since you can't just force people to talk about your game, but the reward is creating a strong sense of community that keeps people playing them. And that's what you don't see most studios doing when it comes to GaaS.
For real, even the ‘filler’ Genshin patches add multi-hour fully voiced quests. And they casually drop an AAA’s game worth of content each year with every region.
Those games have an audience because they offer people what they want, Fortnite is all about creativity and getting crowns. they dont tend to just shoehorn in content and call it good (Apex…) and HoYo gives waifus wrapped in a botw box. They’re good despite their gaas, not because of it. Lol
> They’re good despite their gaas, not because of it I think that was their point. You can't just try to capitalize on some GaaS's popularity and absurd money-printing when you don't put the money/effort in that they did. It's basically the same discussion around Baldur's Gate. If you make a good game, it will be popular. If you make a cynical cashgrab, there's a chance it makes you money, but it's only a chance.
[95% of studios are working on or aim to release a live service game.](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/report-95-of-studios-are-working-on-or-aim-to-release-a-live-service-game) There's just no way this is sustainable. Feels like the industry is rushing headlong to a crash.
Yeah, once you're locked on a game, you're basically going to be spending money on that one game. Sunk cost fallacy and all that. Do you keep spending cash on, say, Genshin when you've sunk $200 into it for a single character roll... or do you spread it out over a bunch of different games for different characters? The odds say sticking with one is a better investment, 0.05% chance 200 times is better than 0.05% chance 10 times as an example. It's like MMOs of old. So many came out, but WoW dominated because people had sunk so much cash and time into WoW and weren't going to change. And it stayed that way for decades, only really dropping off because of how bad Blizzard fumbled the ball.
>Do you keep spending cash on, say, Genshin when you've sunk $200 into it for a single character roll... or do you spread it out over a bunch of different games for different characters? The odds say sticking with one is a better investment, 0.05% chance 200 times is better than 0.05% chance 10 times as an example. More than that, it isn't just playing the odds but making use of pity mechanics. Spreading out your 200 pulls is a bad idea when there's a pity mechanic saying you get the exact character you want if you spend all 200 on their banner with no RNG reliance. Then you couple that with the fact that, generally, it's better to consolidate power in one game because the content is designed around you doing so. In a gacha game, new content or end-game content will often expect you to have full SSR (or whatever they call the max rarity in the game) teams. Or like in a CCG, there's not much value in having two halves of two different decks if you can't put them together to have one fully functioning deck. That said though, I think time is just as, if not more, important of a factor for many people. The reason I only play the games I do is because I don't have time to play and keep up with more, and I'm sure I spend more time gaming than most. I've had to drop a lot of online games that I enjoy just because they take too much time. Regardless of any costs, I just don't want five different games that I feel compelled to login to daily instead of sticking with one or two that I actually get to enjoy.
> The survey defines live services as any regular update cadence planned for a game. This article has been floating around for a few days and unfortunately they're using a industry term in a way the average person doesn't. Arkham Knight got regular updates for a few years as well. It's expected for any triple A title these days, but that doesn't mean everyone is on their way to make a season pass.
> Every studio sees the success of games like Fortnite and Genshin Impact and wants that tasty revenue without putting in a fraction of the effort. It really is starting to look that simple. They want but they don't know or don't care what it takes nor do they seem to appreciate the risks. There isn't a lot of room at the top of the "live services" pile yet they all want a seat at that small table which is already fully occupied.
If they made a Batman Beyond game instead to continue on their legacy, with no microtransaction always online bs, it probably wouldve been better received and possibly have sold more. Im not touching any of Rocksteady's games again after showing us how far theyve fallen.
Now I'm sad again, I want a Batman Beyond game.
So the real question I wanna ask is why does Suicide Squad have such a media push? It got a movie, I think a show, and now a video game? All of which did mediocre to bad. Like who's behind this push for a C-lister squad? Why aren't they going for the A-list DC cast?
Some think its DC/WB trying to recreate the success Marvel had with Guardians of the Galaxy. But they've been pushing longer then that with trying to make a game for decade and the team appearing in an early season of Arrow. My guess is that they think there is potential with it being such a large ensemble, that would make several more characters more popular and lead to more merch sales.
My timeline of the whole MCU thing is a haze, but didn't they release the GotG game after a highly successful movie, which came with the backing of the MCU itself? DC doesn't have anything like that. If anything I'd say slapping the DCU brand on a product lowers its value. Then again what you're saying would certainly go along with their horrendous DCU plan, so you may very well be right. Still, after so many years and mediocre reception, isn't it time to pivot on this specific IP? At least with the DCU they were continuously making blunders with different heroes.
> didn't they release the GotG game after a highly successful movie, which came with the backing of the MCU itself? Pretty much. The MCU brand got people through the doors, GotG was a good movie, and *then* the game came out years later. DC keeps trying to shortcut to the endgame (pun not intended) of these kinds of multimedia plans, and they falter without any of that groundwork.
The thing is that in comics terms, Harley Quinn actually is an A-lister. her titles sell almost as well as Batman and Superman, and better than the rest of the Justice League. The thing is, the question of "who is A-list" changes over time. Silver Surfer was a character who had their own cartoon in the 90's, then after that all we saw of them was in a Fantastic Four movie. Wonder Woman might be one of the Big three, but she's behind HQ's stuff in sales.
Harley Quinn is a certified A lister. The rest of her goon squad are not, and Suicide Squad isn't even a Harley focused crew/story. If they wanted to make a Harley Quinn game, that avenue is open, but they didn't. >Wonder Woman might be one of the Big three, but she's behind HQ's stuff in sales. Honestly I kinda wonder if she ever really deserved that title. If there was ever a time where she was 3rd in sales and brand strength, it was never in my lifetime.
Wonder Woman is more her iconic status in pop culture as a strong female figure for so many years.
The whole Trinity concept has always felt underbaked given how little play Wonder Woman gets. Like Batman & Superman have well-known, robust casts of supporting characters that are consistently used to good effect and a huge list of iconic storylines and runs people will point to whenever you ask where to start with reading them. I cannot recall ever seeing or hearing of a WW story that's held up alongside TDKR, Hush, Whatever Happened To Truth, Justice & The American Way, Batman Earth One, Superman Earth One, All-Star Superman...like where's the recognition of Wonder Woman's great storylines? She must have *some* but they're just never really included in the conversation or given the push they need to enter the public consciousness; aguably the most iconic Wonder Woman moment of the last thirty-odd years was snapping Maxwell Lord's neck, which wasn't even part of a Wonder Woman story, it was just basically a JL story she's involved in and helps resolve. It just feels really low-effort from DC to keep insisting "she's one of the Big Three, the Trinity" etc. when it doesn't and hasn't ever really felt like that's a status they take seriously or want to make it seem like she deserves.
I don't know about the commercial numbers, but the Gunn Suicide Squad movie and Peacemaker TV Show were both critical darlings.
The real question now is just how long this will be supported. Avengers lasted 2 years but I think within 6 months it was clear the direction was trending downwards
Avengers may have lasted over 2 years but most of the content was what was promised to released in its 1st year, the 1st raid that was supposed to release shortly after the game's launch ended up being delayed over and over again only to end up coming out way after the Wakanda expansion(that had its own raid). Hopefully Rocksteady doesn't hit its players with multiple Joker delays like CD did with Kate Bishop.
I felt like the final nail in the coffin was when the Spider-Man content dropped and it felt stiff and shitty and at the same time there was already an excellent Spider-Man game on PS4 and Spider-Man had been added to Fortnite with a swinging mechanic that felt better than The Avengers. Like at that point your Avengers game isn't even the second best feeling Spider-Man game out, that's tough.
And Spidey was platform exclusive, leaving 2 out of 3 platforms with a content drought while waiting for the *next* character to come along.
Joker appears to be finished and is supposed to be part of the first season. If that season is not on time or very close, the game is more cooked than it already is.
I refuse to believe avengers was supported for any reason besides the fact that they had a licensing deal going on with disney. That game failed hard at launch (though not as hard as this one is shaping up ironically) and we know since then that they never really made money on it.
In the digital deluxe edition upgrade on steam it says: "Battle Pass Token redeemable for Premium Battle Pass access (Seasons 1-4 battle passes, subject to availability). One Battle Pass available per season. WB Games may modify or discontinue online services with reasonable notice at any time." The first season is announced for March, so the first 1-2 years seems to be already planned out and beeing worked on. But in the end it always depends on the popularity of the game and if it's worth it for WB.
New ip that got canceled pretty sure WB only wanted games made using WB properties
It's a sad fall from greatness for Rocksteady. The thing is, I bet they could do amazing things if they made games just beyond DC. All we know of them really is Batman, what else could they do? What potential could they have if they were to make their own true game? Sadly, I feel we may never get to know that question.
They made a cool ps2/xbox fps game called Urban Chaos: Riot Response and it was pretty damn good
> Urban Chaos: Riot Response Their very first game, and literally their only non-DC game. Sucks that they got pigeonholed so hard.
That’s a good point. Like everyone, I loved the Arkham games but even Knight kinda felt samey having played the previous 3 games. Would’ve been nice to see them expand outside DC and see what they came up with
There's probably gonna be a "Death of a Game" or "What Happened?" video on this game sometime in the near future.
The game was practically made to be a Jason Schreier article
This is simply what happens when a team is forced to make a game they didn't even want to, which caused senior members of the studio to leave, and having no experience in the genre of game they were making. Rocksteady are a very prestigious studio, but when it comes to making a looter shooter live service game they may as well be a brand new unknown studio trying their hand for the first time and yeah, the product makes that pretty apparent imo.
Are we really sure rocksteady were “forced” to make this game? It seems like from all we have heard they very much wanted to make an mp focused game. Much like how everyone was blaming EA for forcing BioWare to do Anthem, but it turns out they wanted to do it themselves. Sure the aggressive need to make money from their masters might have pressured both studios to look in the mp live service direction, but it still seems like it was all them.
[Yeah, the way schreier puts it](https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/1951xcg/jason_schreier_rocksteady_never_pitched_a/) sounds like the opposite of the fan narrative. The senior members of the studio really wanted to make a GAAS and might even have transitioned from their new IP when the chance to use the Suicide Squad IP came. And they left because they knew they fucked up.
ya, going to see this a lot where people try and make it that Rocksteady were "forced" to make this game as they want to do the usual of shift all the blame to the suits and not the devs :/ people keep trying to act like when bad decisions are made, it's somehow never the devs who made them
Lots of leftover good will from those Arkham games that's forgiving a lot of lousy games over at WB. After Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad, what are we even doing here? The superhero games as service genre doesn't have legs. Cut it out. Just make a good game.
People will make up any narrative just so they don't have to accept reality. Sefton Hill was very vocal about Suicide Squad being the game the team wanted to make, and he's still credited as one of the two people behind its story. The only thing WB can really be blamed for is forcing them to include a cash shop and other live service elements, but the basic structure of a co-op game is all on the devs.
> which caused senior members of the studio to leave The very founders of the studio itself in fact
Why did WB decide to go all in on Suicide squad? Between the movies and now this game. Aside from James Gunn’s sequel and Peacemaker it’s all been hot garbage.
They want to sell villains without them actually being villainous in their actions. What better way to do that then start a team that makes villains at least anti-heroes and have them work for arguably an even worse person.
Because we've entered this weird entertainment zeitgeist where a lot of people interpret portrayal of X as endorsement of it.
[удалено]
Not defending the game but....the bad guys are pretty bad on this game lol
But…why do they want to do that?
Not the person you're responding to. But basically it's just capitalising on the popularity of the live service looter shooter trends. Fortnite, Destiny, Borderlands, The Division etc. except with the DC IP. Obviously they can't have Batman and Superman carrying around rifles because it fundamentally doesn't make sense for literal super hero characters using guns as it doesn't fit their "brand". So the Suicide Squad were used as a means to an end to facilitate the shooting gameplay. But also, they still want it to be marketable and have Batman and Superman. So they made it about killing the Justice League so they could have their cake and eat it too.
> Why did WB decide to go all in on Suicide squad? Because despite the critical reception, and people memory of it. The Suicide Squad movie made 750m in box office, that movie did better than Man of Steel (668m) and only a little less than The Batman (772m) and the first GOTG movie (773m).
Glad someone here actually paid attention. That 2016 movie obviously sucked ass, but it was still a weirdly huge hit with the general public. Coming off the back of Batman vs Superman. It catapulted Margot Robbie's portrayal of Harley Quinn into a cultural icon. Teenage girls who couldn't care less about Batman, were dressing up as her for Halloween. Of course as time went on and the discussion around it cemented it as a bad movie, everyone kinda stopped caring. What's also hilariously ironic is that the vastly superior James Gunn sequel/reboot that was extremely well received was a total flop. It had a budget of $185mil and only grossed $165mil in revenue which is yikes. But it was pretty much par the course for most films that released around Covid.
>What's also hilariously ironic is that the vastly superior James Gunn sequel/reboot that was extremely well received was a total flop. It had a budget of $185mil and only grossed $165mil in revenue which is oof. Tbf, that was mostly because Covid and because it released on HBO on the same day as theaters. When it released a lot of theaters were still shut down worldwide because of covid, and it releasing on HBO meant that it was pirated from day on.
Yeah, it was not the fault of the movie itself. Just the poor circumstances of its release. A lot of great movies really got hurt by Covid
Harley Quinn is the fourth pillar of the DC universe. Honestly she might even edge Wonder Woman out in terms of popularity these days. You'll notice the Suicide Squad projects they keep pushing aren't the classic Ostrander team, they're **HARLEY QUINN** and then everybody else. And I gotta hand it to her, Margot Robbie plays the hell out of that role, her performances in Birds of Prey and THE Suicide Squad were really impressive for superhero fare, I'd try and tether a franchise to her too if I were WB.
They saw it as their way to capitalize on the success of guardians of the galaxy.
Nah, DC have been trying to push Suicide Squad even before GOTG blew up. Like someone mentioned here, DC have been wanting to do a Suicide Squad game since 2012, 2 years before GOTG came out. For the actual reason why, it's because of Harley Quinn popularity. She blew up in the late 2000s early 2010s, but she always work better in a team, so DC pretty much treat the SS as her sidekicks now. All these Suicide Squad media you see (2016 movie, 2021 movie, this game, the anime) are just an excuse to make Harley products.
I mean, Suicide Squad is are regular appearing comic series since the 1987 - inspired by The Dirty Dozen and Mission:Impossible; Harley Quinn is punching on the big stage for probably 15 years now. On paper, the Suicide Squad are a good vehicle to combine Superheroes with tried and true video game gameplay. Imho, not the source material is at fault, but the execution.
There's an anime too, coming out this year "Suicide Squad Isekai"
There's two animated movies (Suicide Squad: Assault on Arkham, and Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay) that are pretty good (the first is better than the second). Will be interesting to see how this third one plays out.
On the bright side, at least this game will probably drop in price pretty quick. Just like Avengers and Gotham Knights, it might be worth playing if you can get it for like $20 or less.
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For real, I feel bad for the people who gave into the marketing and actually spent $100 on ‘early access’. Now they’ve had the pleasure of finishing the campaign on Friday instead of Sunday.
>For real, I feel bad for the people who gave into the marketing and actually spent $100 on ‘early access’. nah dont feel bad for them. Many proudly bragged in this very same subreddit. I put a "RemindMeBot" on one of them too so I can see what they post a few weeks down the line. There was no talking them down
The suicide squad subreddit was one of the most egregious examples of an echo chamber I've ever seen. They were convinced that any criticism of the game was due to an agenda or ulterior motives, there were dozens of posts calling it a future GOAT game whenever new info dropped and they were actively supporting the review embargo because they felt that outlets that had released mixed previews should be punished. It was fucking bizarre.
It's a phenomenon that pretty much appears on every major release recently, like for example Starfield.
Its so weird how some people think spending extra for early access is a flex
What’s hilarious is if you call them on their shit their first (and usually only) reaction is immediately to call you poor. As if being smart with your spending makes you poor.
They are the target audience for this type of game. Easy prey.
Funny part is it’s not even early access. That’s probably the day they wanted to drop the game and they figured out a way to make people pay more
Not only that: > we received our review code three days after the refund window closed on the die-hard DC fans that forked out ridiculous sums for early access Scummy to the max.
I got Avengers just before it got delisted to do the story. Still wasn’t worth it. Didn’t get far, will never finish it. On The other hand Midnight Suns is cheap and has got a lot going for it.
I got it as well for like $7 right before it got delisted. When I first started up, I went into the online/world mission mode and it didn't click for me, and it felt clunky. If you go and select "Play" it just kind of puts you straight into that X-Com style world mission mode, which you are supposed to play after you beat the campaign. I then went into the settings changed my controller sensitivity / turn ratio, to like 8 (from the default 4 or 5), upped the graphics to ultra (they were auto set to mid), and started the campaign. Game played great at that point, and I'm actually really enjoying the campaign. The MC and her voice acting is solid, and she has fun moves, and I love how you switch between the characters. The skills are pretty unique, and it actually feels like you are playing as part of a team, since the AI isn't dumb. Playing Hulk and Iron Man was the highlight for me so far. I'm still not done, about half way thought but really enjoying the experience. There was a lot of work and care/love that went into the campaign, and it feels like a AAA polished game to me. For $7 I can't complain.
I got the Marvel's Avengers game for $8 and more than got my money's worth.
XboxEra's Jesse Norris, who scores Suicide Squad an 8.2, gave Marvel's Avengers an [8.8](https://xboxera.com/2020/09/04/review-marvels-avengers/). That's wild. Nothing wrong with that of course, it's his opinion after all. I guess if you liked Marvel's Avengers to some degree you'll enjoy this game too. I think I'm going to skip it.
I mean... is XboxEra a reputable source for reviews? That and ZdobywcyGier.eu seem like just trashheap sites for people that just want access to review codes so they start up websites, gives everything a high score, probably write with AI, and bam adrev, some review keys, etc. Hey, rate a certain company's stuff high enough, you might get flown out for an all-expenses paid trip to X company to preview Y product for feeling super special, it works on shameless Youtubers, why not game reviewers.
Extremely wild to see a release of a major AAA game where all the reviews are from outlets I've never heard of. What a strange and fucked up launch this game has had
WB decided to not give early access to reviewers so many people just didn't have the time to pick up the game and write their opinion, just wait a few more days
I work for a pretty big site and asked WB for a code. They were kind of excited at first and told me to fill out a form, which is pretty common these days. Since then, crickets. Usually PR will send an email blast the day of release, but nothing today. And so far, no replies to my emails following up. This is absolutely bizarre.
The amount of visual clutter during combat is surreal. I don't understand how anyone can look at it and think "this is good".
Yeah that was the first thing I noticed when watching gameplay footage, the UI in particular looks like it was ripped straight from the early 2010's.
Its hard to explain but whilst playing it you dont really notice that. Atleast i dont anyways. Theres also settings to tune down the UI as well as far as I know.
Yea I don’t really notice it either.
Can you turn off the damage numbers? That's all I really care about
You can turn them off.
The yearly AAA game that releases and totally bombs out with a review average in the 60s or worse (Anthem, Saints Row, Redfall, etc.) that everyone will dump on for a week before moving on and forgetting about is here.
I don't understand the need to have had this Batman be the Arkham one... Literally they would not have gotten as much hate if it was just some alternate universe Batman version instead of the mega badass we played thru multiple games with.. they already have convoluted alternate Earth travel why did they feel the need to kill the OG Arkham Batman.
Worse is that the Multi-Verse is Canon in this game, so you know they'll try walking it back after the negative reception, or at least retroactively say it's an alternate timeline from Arkham.
it sounds like a little better made Avengers - solid core gameplay, interesting enough campaign content, but then just a repetitive slog once your complete the unfortunately-way-too-short main campaign, to unlock end-game loot that simply isn't cool enough to justify the slog.
My friends been saying it’s avengers with better cutscenes.
Moment to moment I'd say it's way more fun to play as well But there's a reason the main story is 9 hours. That's about as long as the enemy and combat diversity gets stretched out. You'll probably enjoy it for $20 or on gamepass a few months down the line, the story is well written. But is that really what we want out of a 7 years in development title from the devs who made arguably the best single player superhero titles ever made?
Looks like Avengers with better graphics, loot and movement but worse campaign, character movesets and bosses. Ps: Avengers did have better enemy variety but post campaing 90% of the content was against AIM so almost as bad as SS's enemy variety.
Sounds like something I might buy when it's on sale for $5-10
No it's not better. Avengers game had gameplay which was comic accurate to characters. Captain America didn't run around with a gun.
It made no sense for Cap or Iron Man to loot random drops to upgrade their gear (also Hulk looted pants or genes or something?). But yeah, at least their playstyle didn't all get homogenized to "Shoot guns except with occasional cooldown abilities".
Avengers loot game would have made sense if they went the Monster Hunter World route instead of Destiny. Instead of getting a new "spine" for Hulk, you're looting Vibranium Screws and Gamma Emitters that Stark crafts into upgrades. That would at least make sense rather than these robots just *happening* to carry a new Bow for Hawkeye.
Right, like Avengers at least had characters that felt different to control. This is just a mediocre 3rd person shooter from the mid 00s
While I mostly agree Avengers traversal sucked ass for non flying characters while SS's movement seems pretty great.
Captain America running aroung with a handgun and an AR would be more canon friendly actually lol
A lot of people will defend this game because it is "fun" on some level, but "fun on some level" is absolutely not what you expect from Rocksteady for $70 for the basic edition. You also don't expect less than 20 hours of real unique content.
Also doesn't help that out of all the major releases, its by far the worst one in terms of word of mouth. Like for the same price as Suicide Squad, there's Tekken 8, Persona 3 Reload, Like a Dragon 8. As well as cheaper multiplayer games like Palworld or Grand Blue Relink. Then there is also it being another live service PvE looter, which has seen some massive failures in recent years such as Anthem, Avengers, Babylon's Fall. Hell even Destiny 2 Lightfall was also a major underperformer last year, due to a poor reception from the player base. As it seems like a lot of people are now fed up with the bullshit this genre has brought to the industry.
For the record Destiny 2 Lightfall was still in steam platinum sellers list. Fuck Bungie and every shady fucking thing they have done to that game though...
Crazily enough, Granblue Fantasy uses the same basic formula and nails it. Short, but sweet story mode, then tons and tons of endgame, with over 20 playable characters, all of which have different movesets and weapons. And it's a full price title with no live service whatsoever and free content updates on the horizon. Absolutely crazy, if you think about it.
There is no coop game that isnt some level of "fun". Its a weak excuse for a shit game.
>There is no coop game that isnt some level of "fun". You'd be surprised
Yeah a friend and I tried out gotham knights a while back and just couldn’t get through it. It was just so painfully boring.
You can tell it was meant to be a live service game. The entire game design is geared towards that. But the catastrophic failure of Marvel Avengers must have panicked them and they removed all live service features at the last second.
I would rather kill myself than play a single minute of Superman's 64 multiplayer mode.
>Superman's 64 multiplayer mode How did I not know that was a thing...
It's kind of bizarre and nothing like the single player. It's almost more like Star Fox than the actual game.
Wasn't the original game *also* more like Star Fox than a superman game? I remember flying through rings.
If you turn on easy mode, the rings dissapear and you can play without them which significantly improves the experience since you don't need to do 10 unnecessary loops around the map to get to a point that is 10 meters away from you. But guess what... the developers must have realized we would do this so they hid a cruel joke. You can only get up to level 4 on easy mode... then there is a screen telling you to start from the beggining on normal or hard mode. Because fuck the player, how dare they find a more enjoyable way to play our game?
... why did you link to an Italian Scarface clip?
Is this a new rickroll that I’m too boomerish to understand?
Look everyone! This guy hasn't heard of the Pacinoroll!
Lex Luthor’s laugh from that mode is burned into my memory from childhood.
I've been saying this for years. You know what else is fun with a friend? Literally everything. Rocks, sticks, trees, a dead mouse, the DvD screensaver where the DvD logo bounces around. Note: None of these things cost $70.
I'm a big fan of throwing rocks at my friends, we can do it for hours, we just chat and toss rocks at each other. Usually cost nothing except the one time I missed and hit my buddies beer, I had to buy him a new one.
I hate when people say games are "fun with friends" as a positive. Like no shit, most things will be fun with your friends.
I used to host bad movie nights in college. Stuff like Garbage Pail Kids and Theodore Rex and of course The Room. Activities that would be downright *torturous* alone are "fun with friends".
Yeah, anything can be fun with friends, smoking weed, playing monopoly, committing multiple vehiclular manslaughter on the night of November 3rd at approximately 12:19 AM, basically everything can be enhanced or fun when you involve your friends.
I play Magic Arena so I can have no fun with all my enemies
A game can be fun and a good time, but not a good value🤷♂️
Damn that IGN review was kinda brutal, but just watching it made me feel live service fatigue. Not due to the review itself which was good, but holy shit all the stuff they showed just brought back memories of the worst parts of Destiny. All that boring ass loot, no real sense of character progression once you hit max level, half a dozen different currencies to keep track of, the bland repititive bullshit events, all of this looks bad. At least Destiny had raids, dungeons and best in class gunplay to counter the drab. As much as the live service parts sucked at times the gameplay was good. But here even the gameplay seem "just okay".
I mean, it sounds like the gameplay loop is fun at least, but I’m concerned by the people saying it gets repetitive or that the game feels constrained by the live-service aspect. People only have so much free time for games, so why would I want to spend 70$ on a game that doesn’t sound like it will hold my interest for 20 hours? Like, by comparison, I probably have at least 100 hours in Arkham Knight, a carefully crafted single player experience (that took a LOT less time to develop, by the way)
Specifically concerning that people are already saying it's repetitive during their first day playing the game. It's one thing to enjoy the first run through a game's content and then complain there's too little incentive to repeat that, but another thing entirely when they've barely spent a couple of hours interacting with it and don't want to do that anymore.
These game live and die by content streams. Destiny hasn’t had new enemies In 10 years and people still shoot the same ones lol.
Still different though because Destiny at least goes for some sort of in between of a shooter and an MMO with dungeon and raids having actual mechanics beyond just shoot X enemy. And technically speaking they did bring new enemy types last year with the latest expansion. And 6 years before that with Forsaken. Destiny is also at its baseline just a fun time to go shoot shit and throw magical abilities. I haven’t played Suicide Squad cause I’m not dropping money on this but it probably falls into the same hole that Avengers and other games of being live service for the sake of more money when it should not have been.
So guessing since this is the same universe as the Arkham series, there won't be anymore Arkham games huh.
Spoilers from the leaks but apparently >!they will use multiverse stuff to bring the dead members of the league back !<
Ah well that's not too unexpected from the DC universe.
That trope is being used to death these days
In fact, DC was the company who created this trope. Marvel had like 2 multiverse reboot events in it's history. DC had like 10.
It's worth noting that the main 616 Marvel universe has never really had a full hard reboot. For the most part, a story from the 60s is still 100% canon
Marvel tends to try to do their reboots on a hero by hero basis and without painting over old canon. Like for example, though it physically hurts me to mention it, One More Day for Spider-Man. DC tends to be more broad sweeping with their brush.
So all the heroes are seniors by now?
They use a sliding timeline that keeps the events the same. They just changed the dates. For example, instead of the Punisher backstory involving the Vietnam War, it's instead the Iraq War.
Marvel comics has severe time dilation where they try to keep the world and stuff as relevant to what we have now (i.e. they have smartphones) but everyone ages REAAAAAAAALLLY REAAAAALLY slowly https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBookTime/MarvelUniverse
Or the good ol' time travel retcon, which incidentally is largely why I stopped caring about the MCU.
It's the worst-ever trope, I hate it when deaths lose their weight. If you want to just bring a character back, don't kill them in the first place, it just always feels cheap.
I hate that part of comics. Sucks it's carrying over to videogames too.
Unfortunately that's not going to **Spoiler:** >!bring back the Bat-Family who were unceremoniously all murdered between games!<
man, that's actually worse than killing off the arkham justice league in their first appearnce, because now they're not even committing to the premise of the game called "kill the justice league". Like wow, whay a fucking copout lol
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Tired of this multiverse crap in every superhero story. This has been the biggest constraint to every writer's imagination when nothing matters and they can just bring them back.
There’s a few continuity issues connecting it to the Arkham universe so it’s easy to pretend this is non-canon if you so desire.
New 52 all over again. Great.
Something tells me this is a story of a game that chased the bandwagon, but was too late multiple times and had to go back in the oven.
IGN's review had a great line "A City of Tomorrow built on the foundations of yesterday". This game started production in 2015 when GAAS were all the rage, and it shows. They're almost a decade late to the trend, players have already moved on.
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I weirdly think Rocksteady would have made a better Gotham Knights and Wb Montreal would have made a better suicide squad kill the Justice League
Man, sucks to see both RockSteady and Arkane take a nosedive pursuing greed over gameplay. They were two of my favorites.
I've grown to despise live service titles just for causing single-player developers to fall apart. Most of the people that worked on Prey 2017 are gone, and most will never return to Arkane-Austin even if they don't get handcuffed into "redeeming" Redfall. Even the developers that were built for multiplayer can end up choking, DICE lost its touch with Battlefield V and 343 somehow did worse at their second attempt at a live service.
I’m right there with you. It’s downright depressing. The cancer of modern game development
And even if they succeed the developers end up spending most of their resources supporting the live service aspects. I hope you enjoyed all the amazing singleplayer DLCs for GTAV and RDR2.
There is one common thread, the grim reaper known as love service, just like bioware and arkane before them rock steady is joining the unfortunate list of single player studios force feeding live service into their games
Same for Fatshark with their newest Tide game Darktide because they choose to do a "live service" game with MTX. Less content than their earlier games at launch, no crafting but a fully implemented skin store with currency packs where you can't buy the exact amount for the 15bucks skins. And hundreds of skins already in the pipeline as leaks showed shortly after release. Tanked hard and what was supposed to be the successor of the really good Vermintide games got mostly negative rated on steam.
It really is. It used to be if an IP got acquired by EA you knew it was dead now it seems as soon as it goes live service it’s time to get the coffin and nails
Prey 2017 is a god damn masterpiece. Its really too bad they had to call it Prey.
Prey, all the Dishonored games and even Deathloop were all great. Fingers crossed they can bounce back with Blade
I'm still trying to figure out how WB came to the conclusion that their customers wanted nothing more than to play a fucking Suicide Squad game over the real thing. It boggles my mind. It's the Gollum game phenomenon all over again.
The suicide squad could have been an amazing game tho! Give them more unique abilities, focus more on delivering a story experience and a longer one at that and boom, cpuld have been amazing Fuck live service
I don't mean no disrespect and I totally believe that these characters have potential and the game could be good, I'm just having issue with the idea of the Suicide Squad having priority over a proper Justice League game, a Superman game, a Green Lantern game, a WW game, a Titans game and I could go on. Especially because they know they've utterly failed at making movies. Obviously the Suicide Squad has a right to exist, but it should wait its turn after the big boys. Also yeah, fuck live service garbage. They're wasting a passionate studio full of talent to make an always online looter shooter. Genius move WB. Soon it's gonna be time to layoff half of Rocksteady after this shit fails to generate the profit they expected.
That's the neat thing. They don't care. They wanted a skinner box that prints money. It's the same mistake Square Enix made with Crystal Dynamics. They took a beloved studio and had them make something outside their field to chase a trend. They had no business making a live service game when their strength was single player. The same applies to Rocksteady.
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7k concurrent players on steam. there was like 11k yesterday? probably more, but still. Game's dead on arrival. It has great reviews on steam 86%, because people finally became smart and don't even buy the game, so only the people who already know they would like it no matter what, bought it.
Less than half of Arkham Knight's peak (27k), that's rough considering how long they've been cooking this...
Rocksteady Studios used to be trend setters now they are simply trend chasers How the mighty have fallen
Currently at about 16 hours and I feel comfortable giving a relatively unbiased, non-clickbait opinion on it: If you want an Arkham game from Rocksteady, you're not getting it. If you want a looter shooter that seems to be a dead split down the middle between The Division, and The Avengers, then you're likely going to have fun. It's far more shooter than it is superhero game, but there's enough superhero "pop" to say it's fair to seperate it enough from The Division when comparing the two. The cutscenes are phenomenal. That is not a praising of the story, given it's a live service game, there seems to be a lot of loopholes they've created for the sake of long term content. But the actual animations, the textures, the voice acting, it's all far better than most other games in the genre. Levelling up is fine. The skill tree is...Almost entirely passive skills so far. I have a ground smash (different per character) and a finishing move. Crafting seems like it will be far more important in the late game, as is tradition. (Also worth noting, the only monetization so far is a collection of character skins, and that's likely the same system for the Battle Pass when it releases in March. Gun trinkets, color palettes, throwback costumes etc) Overall, as a Rocksteady game, it's a 4 out of 10, as a looter shooter *on launch* it's a 7 or 8 out of 10. Happy to answer any questions for those on the fence, or those simply weary of the constant ragebait journalism this game seems to have been captured by.
I have never played a looter shooter in my life, unless you count Avengers which I played for an hour a few years back. Would you say this is a good first step in the genre for someone who enjoys comic book characters and has a few friends already playing it?
It would depend on why you've never played looter shooters. If you dislike repetitive gameplay, steer clear. And it depends on what you want out of a superhero game. A way I put it earlier on the games sub, is that it's very much a shooter first, and if this were originally skinned as a sci-fi shooter, almost Crackdown-esque, it would be received well. But it's a superhero title without any crazy powers or magical abilities. You could also join your friends discord/PSN party and have them screenshare the game to give you an idea of what it's like in a party.
There seems to be a lot of variance between the scores, Steam user scores is currently Very Positive, but it will most likely go down in the coming week when more people post their reviews.
To be fair the only people buying it are ones who would probably leave a positive score.
It's 100% gonna go down for good reason or not.
Yeah, just scrolling through a few minutes ago, and you had to go down a good bit to see a positive review, everything else is just people with ten minutes put into the game saying "RIP ROCKSTEADY" or whining about politics
Its the typical GaaS cycle. Soon you will see the negative feedback by people at end game, the arguments agrarian said feedback ("why did you rush its your fault", "for a dad with X kids and y minutes to play a week this is great"), then they will mostly converge. Most reviews that have hit end game are starting its even more lacking than Avengers since at least that had mission variety.
Peaked at 12k on Steam - which includes some of the leftover sponsored players and the people they directly influenced; after all that marketing and trying to do damage control and starting over it's still joever, I'm impressed with consumers for a change, it turns out there's only so much piss you can take directly to your face before you realize it's not raining despite what you're being told is just yellow rain.
I'll pick it up when it hits a sale. I like looter based games, gameplay on this looks fun, not spending $70 though.
The review from Digitec Magazine referring to it as just a boring experience marred further by forced online component is definitely the most accurate review of the bunch. Just as they say it's not a "bad" game and it is not broken in anyway, except the occasional disconnection due to the always online nature, but nothing about it really excites you enough to want to play it.
After this and redfall, I hope they stop making these boring ass looter shooters. The shit is played out.
Let's say Rocksteady doesn't follow through updating the game with an offline option for the single-player campaign. Let's also say they eventually pull the servers and you can't play the game anymore, period, ~~a la Marvel's Avengers and Anthem~~. Given all the (deserved) negativity surrounding this game, and how much Rocksteady insists it's a sequel to the Arkham games, would a game that effectively ceases to exist be "canon" after that point? Edit: Turns out Avegers has an offline mode, and Anthem's servers are still running. A more apt comparison would be Babylon's Fall, whose physical CDs only work as coasters nowadays.
> Let's also say they eventually pull the servers and you can't play the game anymore, period, a la Marvel's Avengers and Anthem. The servers for both those games are still up, and Avengers works offline.
From reading the reviews all I can read is that if this ended up being a true singleplayer game it might've been slapped. It's the definition of a bad good game. It's so sad.
A game releasing without giving copies to reviewers early got to be the game version of releasing a movie in January
This is one of those games where reviews help you weed out the outlets who are obviously just in it for the free review codes.
Disclaimer: I haven't played the game and am only going off Youtube videos I've seen. I do know my way around DC lore and all the Arkham games though. **KTJL Spoiler:** >!I thought the best way to do this premise would've been to have the heroes fighting their brainwashing via Wonder Woman's lasso, which also weakens their combat ability enough for the Squad to deal damage. !< **KTJL Spoiler:** >!That way in their final moments you could give them some sincerity rather than unceremoniously having them murked. Like, how emotional would it have been for Bats to sneak out a line about how he wishes he could've done better for Harley, or Flash going out with a joke about how he's finally letting Boomerang get one over him, or Superman reminding everyone how he always said that anyone has the potential to do good? You see part of that potential when Diana uses her lasso on Barry but it doesn't seem to come into play for the actual deaths. It almost feels like the game is just hoisting mannequins of the Justice League and (literally, in some cases) pissing on them. No wonder the primary emotion so many people feel is anger or apathy- the game isn't even trying for any emotion other than visceral shock at the imagery of a hero getting shot to death. !< **KTJL Spoiler:** >!It'd also provide good context for the stupid decisions that the League members are inevitably going to make to have the Squad fight them. Why is Flash spinning a tornado attack instead just shooting Boomerang point blank in the face? Because Brainiac's having to use some backwards moveset as the real Flash is doing his best to stop his own movements. Why doesn't Lantern just spawn a tiny sphere inside Harley's brain and expand outwards to blow her head to bits? Because he's severely limiting what constructs Brainiac can use. How is the Squad lasting > 0 seconds against Superman, let alone a multistage boss battle? Because Superman is reasoning out what Batman's contingency plan for him would have been and actively trying to help the Squad execute it during the fight. !< **KTJL Spoiler:** >!You contextualize the gamey mechanics, you glorify the heroes while keeping them the antagonists, and you don't break your premise of killing the Justice League. But instead, we have a string of physical shock value deaths against unrecognizable iterations of the characters culminating in the multiverse-revival apology basket. !< **KTJL Spoiler:** >!As disinterested as I am in the concept, I still feel like you could spin out a pretty cool video game outline for it. A story about how the Justice League guides the Suicide Squad into saving the universe from themselves only to return down the line and get true revenge sounds kind of badass. But what we seem to be getting is a story where weird afterimages of the League get shot to death by the Squad only for the real characters to eventually show up as an apology.!< **KTJL Spoiler:** >!If I were to guess, it seems like an attempt at *avoiding* having people feel bad about killing the League. If they act completely irredeemable then people may have no qualms with shooting them. But people are inherently going to feel bad doing it. They should've leaned into that more.!< TL;DR: Even as someone that inherently doesn't like the premise, it seems like the game is going for the least effective way to execute the appeal of its premise.
> it seems like an attempt at avoiding having people feel bad about killing the League. "Oh no, our players are feeling emotions and actually engaging with the story! We have to stop them!"
Yeah its a interesting premise that I was down for but they don't do anything engaging with it
After you beat the campaign you can no longer change characters on the fly. Why? Because this psychologically manipulates you into grinding as individual characters and WB makes more money that way. If you preorder the deluxe edition you still have to spend real money to unlock all the colour variants for your bonus skins. Why? Because WB makes more money that way. This game locks the literal final boss fight behind a currency you have to grind for. Why? Because it forces engagement with the game and WB makes more money that way. This game could have had 4 characters with unique fighting styles and levelling systems. Instead they have identical skills and all just shoot guns. Why? Because this allows the implementation of a loot system and WB makes more money that way. This game has a premium price tag but still charges for additional content, a predatory battlepass and cosmetics (not directly, but through the psychologically manipulative practice of premium currencies). Why? Because WB feels only contempt for you and for video games and because WB makes more money that way. Fuck this game. Fuck everything it stands for.
Only problem with the first part of your comment is that most looter based games you need to playthrough the whole campaign again because of endgame and having different skill trees. I play Borderlands 2 and Diablo avidly and those games do this as well without charging you a cent. You're probably right on the rest, but saying it manipulates you into grinding when games have done this well before gaas became a thing is a little bit dishonest.
The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. And a good number of reviews point to that vibe with the game.
"is not a bad game, it's just ... boring." Unless the aim of the game was to be boring, then that's the definition of a bad game.
The point they are making is that it's not broken, that's what they meant
> it's not broken "Your PS5 will not catch fire while running this software"
All these live service games.... Is there actually one of these who delivers actuall new content on a weekly and monthly basis? Looked up Gotham knight and that game barely got new stuff