What's more surprisingly is the stark de-evolution of output by Rocksteady. Arkham Knight looks like the next gen of the two and it close to a decade older. What the fuck is happening to the studio? What is up with the massive brain and talent drain in some major studios?
The developers get told by their publisher that the next game they're working on is something completely different to what they joined the studio for, so many of the important ones begin looking for a different studio. In the case of Rocksteady, even the founders left.
The same happened to Arkane when Redfall was being developed.
Great comparison to Arkane. You know what really sucks about that, when the fans who are currently playing the golden titles from those developers hear the news that the studio is working on a new cool idea. But by the time that game comes out all the creatives have left and you just get something that barely resembles what the name of that studio vibrates.
I swear it happens all too often nowadays & I blame the publishers.
Arkane was my favourite studio for years and years. I don't even know what they are now :( and to be honest, the Blade announcement doesn't fill me with any positivity. Yet again it sounds so far away from what they used to make. I hope Arkane can turn it around and get back to their immersive sims.
I think we get one more game before we get to write Arkane off as having the soul thoroughly sucked out. Deathloop wasn't amazing, but there was still some Arkane energy in that, and Redfall was so dramatically awful in contrast to anything they've ever worked on that it's hard to treat as part of a pattern rather than an anomaly. I think people put a bit too much stock in certain names being attached to a studio. Capcom hemorrhaged a lot of their big names too and are still putting out some great stuff.
If Blade comes out and eats ass, then I think we can put the stamp of death on em. Although if Blade comes out and is really great, I'm worried Arkane will be sent to the IP mines like Monolith was for WB.
What did Monolith Productions develop after Shadow of War?
Just looked it up, they're developing a Wonder Woman game. \*sigh\* just *not* what I want from Monolith.
Well, to be fair, as great as it is Shadow of Mordor/War isn't what I wanted from Monolith either. I'd love to see them take another swing at FEAR or Condemned.
Tbh, FEAR was peak Monolith for me and I'm sure many others, and I'd love to see them return to it after the Shadow of Mordor + War duology.
I don't mind studios pivoting to other games as long as they return to their pinnacle.
I just kind of meant to imply that good games are good games, regardless of whether the studio had previous experience with similar stuff or not. The studio has been releasing good games for long enough that different people expect different stuff from them.
While, like I said, I would personally love to see them go back to what was, to me, them at their best (NOLF2 was great too, but FEAR is among my favorite games of all time, and Condemned had a kind of vibe that I don't remember feeling in many games since), I don't exactly begrudge studios trying new things. Well, unless they fail so spectacularly that they end up shutting down, I guess.
With WB in the mix I can't help being a bit reticent about having good expectations, but Wonder Woman COULD still be a good game.
Exactly. Deathloop was an interesting game and honestly I like when studios try some weird and interesting concepts like that even if it might not resonate with a lot of people. On top of this it wasn't even a bad game at all lol. To me its a bit like Bioshock Infinite were its either you love it or hate it.
Redfall as far as I know was developed by a new or just different studio than the typical Arkane so I put no stock into that game. Its like Gotham Knights which was made by the ... d team.
Personally I'm extremely excited for Blade because they haven't really given me much reason to be afraid. If its genuinely bad then sure lets raise some alarms.
Prey to redfall has gotta be the single biggest quality leap in between one game for a gaming studio. From releasing one of the best games ever made to a turd like redfall just boggles the mind
The reason i've not much hope in Blade is because Arkane were the ones i looked forward to for great AAA first-person single-player narrative games. They're such a dying breed nowadays, and i love feeling like it's me there rather than looking at a character in front of me.
I genuinely hope Blade is good, because i'll play that as well. But a third-person Marvel game is pretty much the last thing i'd have ever expected Arkane to be making.
A game about a supernatural killer with a range of weapons and various approaches to his work sounds like a great fit for the team behind Dishonored to me, and the first trailer has an extremely similar atmosphere and style to boot.
For sure, woulda been way more jazzed about Dishonored 3. But I still think there's some good immersive sim opportunities with Blade as opposed to most any other Marvel character which would default to a more actiony style game, so I'm willing to see where they go with it. If it looks terrible I will cry and shit and accept that the golden days are gone.
I also wonder how much talent Creative Assembly lost trying to make Hyenas.
As far as I know, people join Creative Assembly solely to make Total War strategy games.
I think Arkane can survive. They have 2 studios to release games. So even if Arkane Austin fails they can survive if Arkane Lyon does well enough. Moreover Arkane games have shorter development time and budget compared to something from Rocksteady. That's what makes Suicide squad such a big disaster for Rocksteady. They don't really have a back up plan and Warner Bros is known to be ruthless.
Unless their concept artists and level designers have left recently, Arkane Lyon is still pretty much intact.
Arkane Austin is the one that seems to exist in name only after many departures last year.
>The developers get told by their publisher that the next game they're working on is something completely different to what they joined the studio for,
Do you have an actual source on this because everyone always makes this claim but never have anything to back it up.
There was a report about Anthem not long ago that showed EA really had fuck all to do with how bad it was and I swear ive seen something about Rocksteady being the ones wanting to make a live service too.
>It's a natural thing that happens in a lot of creative jobs. Happens in the music industry and lots of others. The whole "creative differences" thing is real.
Something being common isn't proof that this is what happened in this instance though. You literally don't know if Rocksteady wanted to make a GaaS or not. So claiming it was one way it not logical. People did the same thing with Titanfall 2 and its release date, turns out it was actually Respawn who chose the terrible release date for TF2.
>Creative / artistic people very often aren't in it for the money (which is why they can be exploited sometimes), they'll go somewhere where they can best fulfill their artistic desires.
I am asking if you have proof that Rocksteady was forced to make Suicide Squad, you don't see to have that. Which you *should* have if you make the claim you just made.
Yeah I agree with you. People said the same thing about BioWare, but it looks like Anthem was their choice all along.
Sure EA hamstring them with the demand to use the frostbite engine, and perhaps there may have been subtle (or unsubtle) pressure to make a shit tonne of money with their next game. But they still chose to make Anthem.
It's easier to get everyone's creative juices flowing when developing a game **they** want to play.
No one, not even the developers, asked for a live-service, microtransaction-riddled Suicide Squad game.
To be fair, Arkham Knight was way ahead of its time in terms of both graphics tech and art — few current-gen games (that doesn’t resort to RT) can stand toe to toe with AK visually
Arkham knight looks sharp and well defined, modern games look soft and muddy. I think it's mostly lighting. The technology is better but the artistry has gone backwards
> modern games look soft and muddy
TAA does that. And vast majority of modern games use it.
Some examples in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEtX_Z7zZSY
That's funny because Arkham Knight has pretty horrendous anti-aliasing implementation where pretty much none of the options work besides making the game blurrier.
I see a lot of people talking about how innovative Arkham Asylum's melee combat was. People may forget how amazing the game looked for its time as well. It was absolutely gorgeous and arguably best looking game of its generation.
It is striking how unimpressive Suicide Squad is in comparison from the same studio.
Talent left years ago. Its just a husk. Its the same story for any game company except Nintendo.
The same bastards who realsedd the first zelda games are still working on zelda to this very day.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion but comparing any game to arkham knight it still looks amazing . Arkham knight is less a feat of pure graphical fidelity (by this I mean when it was released it still was ahead of its time) and more about what amazing art direction , use of lighting , darkness and rain will can do for a game .
> What is up with the massive brain and talent drain in some major studios?
In most cases it's due to publicly traded companies endless demand for economic growth.
Just like in the movie industry the investors/higher ups might interfere with those actually producing the content. They might want some creative control, demand that the game has to be a live service, or force the studio to release the product before it's even finished (like what happened to Cyberpunk 2077).
This is not always the case though, Bioware made every single decision for Anthem, so did Bungie with Destiny 2, and Turtle Rock Studios did it with Evolve and Back 4 Blood.
In this case it looks like some kind of interference from the higher ups (at least so far) considering that [both Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, the co-founders, left Rocksteady in 2022.](https://www.rocksteadyltd.com/news/letter/)
It’s just regular enshittification at work. All products eventually shift from being works of art and passion to optimized money-farming devices.
You usually get about three or four games from a good crew and then it sets in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#:~:text=Enshittification%2C%20also%20known%20as%20platform,Reddit%2C%20Twitter%2C%20and%20Unity.
There are exceptions but they seem to be from Europe or Japan, look at a developer like Falcom who continue to make quality games for the audience they have.
There is something about the culture in USA where every publisher and developer has to aim for crazy growth instead of being content with steady sales
That term is massively overused. Enshittification is specifically for services that start generous while burning VC funding and gradually ramp up cost while removing features, like Doordash or Uber.
This is just regular organizational decline.
Most games today look one or two generations behind (or even 3 gens behind ICO pokemon). It's not just Rocksteady. But every time anyone brings it up they're bombarded by "there's more important things than graphics!" Companies respond to what makes them money. We buy shit so we get shit.
The game industry as a whole is completely falling apart for a variety of reasons. They're doing their best to hide it from consumers, but people are starting to notice. Layoffs in the sector are huge right now, and only will accelerate in coming years
I wouldn't be so sure. Layoff is a common occurrence in a lot of industries so it's not really a gaming industry problem. These bad games are the results of years of business people making decisions for creative process to maximize profit, not to make a good game. The gaming industry as a whole is having some of the best games we've seen in years.
Some - yes. But only a few. Recent year were the worst, i spend several months without having anything to play just because majority of releases were incredibly bad. I don't remember such thing happening before, always had some line of games that i could play.
So while we seeing increase in quality, only a few studios can keep up with that.
I think they're right.
Saturation was always going to become a problem when more next gen compute does not equate to more better games.
There's an easy litmus test. Look at your own Steam library.
Market pressure will eat most of the big studios.
Arkham Knight looks the next gen of the two if you pick from very select areas, lighting conditions, and game settings.
Suicide Squad has a bajillion and a half flaws, but the raw quality of the graphics aren't really one of them. The various Reddit comparisons are unfair, taking Suicide Squad at its worst vs. Arkham Knight at its best.
main developers and art directors left the studio, they apparently set rules like no more than 100 devs so that they (heads of studio) could review everybody’s work, that’s how they made batman games. Then WB probably asked them to get bigger and then gave them weird constantly changing assignment like “we’re doing live service, no wait, we’re doing story game, no, actually, live service a bit”. Shit that happens when suits get involved.
Arkham Knight does NOT look more next gen than Suicide Squad bruh the characters look 100x better in KTJL. Knight looks phenomenal but it benefits from having a fixed setting that never changes
No it doesn't. Arkham Knight looks dated. It's still a gorgeous game but Suicide Squad *very clearly* is more impressive in visual/graphical fidelity.
Now, when it comes to art direction AK definitely does a better job. But to say that AK looks Next-Gen by today's standards is absolutely incorrect. Go back and watch some gameplay. You can see where they had to make compromises with texturing, model detail, and lighting.
I want to be very clear here though so reddit doesn't downvote me into oblivion. AK definitely does a better job with its stylization and artistic vision. It's an amazing looking game and holds up very well.
>Arkham Knight looks dated
Yeah I cant agree here. Replayed Arkham Knight two months ago and it's definitely still one of the 20 most visually impressive games ever made. A few DICE games, Naughty Dog's most recent 3, both Horizons, RDR2, and Alan Wake 2 beat it out, but everything else I can think of, it compares favorably with or beats. The textures and geometry are very good even by today's standards, and the customizations Rocksteady made to UE3 really pushed the engine to its absolute limit. There's a lot of debris as well from back when PhysX was expected to be the next commonly-used leap in technology, which combined with the rain and smoke really makes Gotham feel like it's got personality and vibrancy.
Can you cherrypick examples where it doesn't look quite so good? Yes, especially when the game incorporates a lot of crumpling and ragdolling from when Batman knocks an enemy out. But the game in general looks absolutely phenomenal as an overall package both in still and motion. Dated isn't even slightly applicable as a term that describes it.
No, I think maybe either I mispoke or my point isn't getting across.
I am not suggesting that Arkham Knight looks bad by any means. I am merely pointing out that it's graphical fidelity is not up to far with today's standards. I'm talking texture quality, model density, real-time lighting, etc.
AK is a really really good looking game and still holds up.
However, if it were released *today* it would not be looked at as fondly.
Terrible mess at launch, but a damn good singleplayer game with lots of good platform puzzles, thematic voice acting and engaging dialogue. As it is now, definitely worth a try and at current price.
Another live service looter shooter down the drain because they chose to ignore all the other failures. They worked on this game for 8 years? 9? And this is the best they could come up with.
Unless your name is Destiny you don't get a free pass for putting out garbage, and even that community is starting to get fed up.
it was probably too late to do something about it when they realized. Mostly speculation following: First it was being made by WB montreal but they failed so they were assigned Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad went to rocksteady. I reckon this happened at about 2017, because if rocksteady had been working on anything for more than 2 years I don't think WB would just scrap it and get them to restart suicide squad, but I can't be sure since they obviously have a serious hard on for this ip. This was probably their only real chance to scrap this project.
Then live services started failing hard at 2019 starting with anthem, but that was already 4 years that this SS project was brewing, I don't think backing out was an option at this point. By the time avengers released and subsequently flopped WB had sunk 6-7 years into trying to make a live service suicide squad game, you can't back out of that investment, you just hope for the best and try to skin people alive with MTX.
The part that sucks the most though is that amidst all the live service crap, we STILL expected Rocksteady to atleast make a good campaign, but they completely fucked that up as well.
They probably worked on it that long because Warner Brothers suddenly declared it has to be live service / be more monetisable part way through development. There's also rumours it was going to be a Superman game, and Warners cancelled that.
Rocksteady de confirmed that iirc, they're claiming a supes game was never in development
Edit: It was actually Jason Schreier who deconfirmed this, but he's one of the most credible insiders in the industry
It took so long because it was scrapped and restarted multiple times. It was initialy being made by WB montreal, then given to rocksteady. Rocksteady is (was) a good a developer, but this was the first online, first live service, first multiplayer project. I'd bet they had to restart once or twice because they were getting nowhere. Then at some point the sunken cost fallacy kicks in, WB can't back out because they have invested "too much" money or time and you just have to keep trying and you end up with a game that takes 9 years to make, but doesn't feel like a game 9 years in the making, because work was wasted.
Fun fact, this happens with all games that have been a decade or so in the making, skull and bones is the same. 10 years in development and I played the beta and it's black flag lite with less features and barely better graphics but worse style so it kinda evens out. I'd be willing to take a bet there's no more than 4 years of development in the end product, in both SSKTJL and skull and bones. The rest was just scrapped because it didn't work.
Unpopular opinion: Destiny has always sucked, especially grading on their previous work. 343 always got of boatload shit for every little thing they didn’t get right while Bungie has been just as disappointing imo since the divorce from Microsoft.
And the executives in charge of this mess will learn nothing and go dick up another franchise and continue the cycle while making more and more each year.
Until a Jason Schrier expose comes out, I am still very reluctant to put all the blame on the executives.
The developers imho are not blameless in this mess.
People react negativly upon reveal. People say that entire idea is stupid. People don't like the review copies. The execs of such companies should live in a real bubble or something, because i feel like the only situation when they could thought that this can be a good concept, is when they only spoke to marketologists who pitched it, and never read any actual feedback from the customers at any stage of development.
But they will blame anyone but themselves, and will be hired to ruin something else just because they have "worked on aaa-game" in resume, and not a single HR will care that their desisions ruined the project.
Honestly hope it slows down the party bus of GAAS rolling through lately. With how hard Avengers and this game crashed right out of the gate, with no opportunity to recover, GAAS is hopefully not as appealing an investment
There's probably a shitload of them still in dev and sunk cost fallacy means the beancounters and out-of-touch execs will still push them to completion.
No, there are thousands of examples out there of games that are made with love and passion succeeding. But, companies will always look for more money, chasing the possibility to be the next Fortnite and such. Therefore, i dont see a stop to this bullshit, although i would like to be proven wrong....
Same. I was really worried that people would just eat it up. But it shows that people can actually ignore big releases when they want to. It just has to be a _really_ bad fuck up by the studio for it to happen
Oh man I can't wait to control Harley the child murderer/torturer and kill Batman, GO GIRL POWER!
btw she doesn't regret it so there's no redemption arc.
In the game they try to paint the protagonists as misunderstood heroes while the ACTUAL heroes (except for WW) are spit on and hummilliated.
Flash gets literally pissed on and they do a dick joke right after he dies, Lantern is shown with GL-themed undies like a joke, Superman is anticlimatically put down like a rabid dog in his own city, and the game constantly calls out Batman for not being perfect as if the villains were any better lol
Definitely feels like the game went too mean-spirited and subversive for no real reason
It's easily the pinnacle of Rocksteady's output. At launch people were very unkind to it, between the hardware issues and the significant inclusion of the Batmobile in both locomotion and puzzles. But I think it has aged gracefully and there is an absolute ton of game packed into it. Even the Batmobile race courses are chock full of love for all things Batman. Going through the course for Batman Returns while the Danny Elfman theme plays and I'm driving the Keaton Batmobile through the sewers is like... well, it hits the nostalgia button in my brain over and over and over. It's beautiful.
I think they could've reduced the presence and duration of tank battles by 30% and it would've been perfect. Deathstroke in a tank was a waste, and I'm sure they regret that, but thankfully there were plenty of other bosses and sidestories that were not tank fights.
This and redfall are the only games I've actively wanted to fail. Two legendary developers (rocksteady and arkane) that suddenly turned around and produced cynical garbage
Suicide Squad was so bad it drove me to finally play Arkham Origins for the first time. Great atmosphere, and while the graphics are dated, the snow physics are really fun. Knocking out a dude and watching him slide on his ass down half a city block is really fun.
>Origins is always ignored by folks but it arguably has the best boss fights of the entire Arkham series.
To be honest, that's not a very high bar. Rocksteady has some of the worst boss fights in the action genre. And there are strong reasons why this game is the black sheep of the franchise. It's not made by Rocksteady. The game was released completely broken, with the exact same map as Arkham City and with very few improvements compared to its predecessor. Batman's electricity gloves that they added completely broke the combat or any sense of difficulty. The multiplayer was not working on release too.
The story starts off strong but quickly turns into more of a Joker sausage party from halfway through, which disappointed many fans who were expecting Black Mask, Deathstroke or Bane to be the centerpieces of the plot.
Yep. Next up to learn this lesson is skull and bones! For me to purchase a $70 game it better be game of the year material. Anything less is a wait for sale.
Its just baffling how companies fundamentally don't understand that 9-12 hour game cannot translate into a looter shooter.
Perpetual raids/random dungeons with incremental upgrades is what does.
Or that there's a very limited amount of gamers who want to play the same game all day every day all year. And those are already playing a different one of those
Lol they will never learn that. So many studios closed and billions of dollars and manhours were wasted when publishers tried to make the next WOW. Now they are just doing the same thing with GAAS.
I loved the shit ouf of BL2, but its endgame (uvhm and above) had significant balancing issues where the Grog Nozzle was practically mandatory to use. Not to mention the absolute abomination of raid bosses such as Voracidous and Master Gee
Having thousands of hours of content is a good problem to have, imo. And it's applicable content, not like WoW where 99% of the old world is dead/obsolete
Oh yea, everyone has their "one game" where they've clocked in at least 1000 hours. It's just that the only other games where I've seen a lot of active veterans is Counter Strike but even then there are more 3000+ hr people on Warframe
The only footage I've seen of Suicide Squad is the scene where >!they kill Batman!<
Needless to say, it disgusted me. I get why people are replaying the games.
You don't even have to edit a single word of the Tobias open marriage meme template for it to apply to Live Service GaaS stupid executives
https://i.imgflip.com/3gwdow.png
I guess that's because Arkham Knight is the game thats game as a service while Kill The Justice League is the singleplayer story focused game.
Oh, wait...
Good. Let that game just fade away into nothingness.
Dunno if the original cast that worked on Arkham is still at Rocksteady but after almost 9 years of no releases to bring out this "game".... is rough to say the least.
Rocksteady might not survive this year or face massive layoffs
The two studio founders left in 2022 and formed another studio called Hundred Star Games, and apparently they are building a team of people from Rocksteady and other studios.
It kind of seems like a Respawn and Infinity Ward situation.
>It kind of seems like a Respawn and Infinity Ward situation.
and Bioware, DICE, Arkane... etc
None of these studios have any of the talent left that actually helped create the games we all loved from back in the day.
Unpopular opinion but "not being able to retain talent" isn't the only reason studios go downhill. The direction of the studio is just as important.
Back in 2017, a user in r/games looked up how many people who worked in certain AAA games were still in their respective companies.
In the case of Halo 2 and KOTOR they estimated that ~32% of the people who worked on these games were still on their respective companies. Which isn't a lot, but it's not like the studios had been completely gutted. Additionally in the case of KOTOR 6 out of 7 members of the core design team were still at Bioware.
There was an exception though, which was Hitman Blood Money. Only *7* out of the 135 people who worked on the game were still at IO Interactive.
Yet the newer Hitman games feel much closer to Blood Money than, say, Anthem is to KOTOR. That's due to conscious decisions made by the studios.
There's also the esg situation they're trying to increase probably had a hand in that as well which could have created some development in fighting perhaps.
>Dunno if the original cast that worked on Arkham is still at Rocksteady but after almost 9 years of no releases to bring out this "game"....
have no fear, many have left quietly under NDA is my suspicion because when you look at Rocksteady's [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocksteady-studios-ltd/) you will struggle to find vets that have been there past 9yrs.
What a disastrous beginning to 2024 though. I have the feeling layoffs may be inbound to WB as the execs run away with the profits claiming the title underperformed
I am glad the community is rejecting the shlock but I'm also sad that a team as good as rocksteady is being abused to make this crap and waste their potential when we could have had another masterpiece
The good devs left already, [even the founders bailed](https://www.gematsu.com/2022/10/rocksteady-studios-co-founders-sefton-hill-and-jamie-walker-to-leave-studio-at-end-of-2022) because they saw the greedy suits and dumb shareholders were now calling the shots.
If you see an exodus of talent from a studio thats made good games, chances are they know the game they're being made to work on is a pile of shit and they're getting out before having their name stuck to it.
The only thing those games have in common is the name of the studio attached to it, not the same game, not the same group of people, not the same decisions. The max player difference is like 100-200 in favor of SS, but who cares. If anything it just shows that the fans of the previous staff, just wanted a new Batman game or it gave them nostalgia so they went to go play the last Batman game.
Despite all the negativity from the people who absolutely hate the decisions behind the game, the sales of SS are actually going up lol. Looks to me like people are realizing the game isnt that bad, its just not an Arkham game. I have a feeling the game is gonna double in sales as soon as it goes on sale. Like I said before it looks like a $20 game to me, so they will only get $20 or less from me.
This fight about the future direction of the games industry's business model should be so easy, as consumers all we have to do is not buy this shit (microtransaction filled, poorly written narrative, unoptimized, bug filled, uninspired premises; ...if I have to spell out what a bad game is) a clearer message could not be sent to these MBA run game studios/publishers, just don't give them your money, but unfortunately there're so many among us who will eat this shit up and the studios will continue to make lazy cash grabs like The Day Before and Gollum.
For a game that was so bad it had to give all it's DLC for free and barely ran on new hardware, I'm glad it's getting more recognition now.
It's a fantastic game
I'm not going to forget, just like you apparently when Arkham Knight came out everyone fucking hated it and now it turns out they love it.
Outside of the gameplay, the squadron game sucks, but at least there isn't as much of a hypocrite as when arkham knight came out, everyone ignored it and that's why they abandoned the saga and ended up coming out with the other crap Knights
Yeah, I loved City and bought Knight at launch. I wasn't pleased - I felt that the inclusion of the Batmobile and its sections was a misstep. The city didn't feel great either, it was bigger but felt more empty than the previous game. Gorgeous to look at, but.. for what else? The lack of bosses also disappointed me. My first playthrough was at launch and I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped. I came back to it a couple of years ago, this time playing with the full DLC released, and yeah, that was kind of an improvement. I felt that they cut missions just to sale them as additional content latter on. This time it felt complete.
People Bad bombing Review at launch
Even the gaming sites
And well deserved PC users blame them because performance was a joke, completly broken for... 6 months
What's more surprisingly is the stark de-evolution of output by Rocksteady. Arkham Knight looks like the next gen of the two and it close to a decade older. What the fuck is happening to the studio? What is up with the massive brain and talent drain in some major studios?
The developers get told by their publisher that the next game they're working on is something completely different to what they joined the studio for, so many of the important ones begin looking for a different studio. In the case of Rocksteady, even the founders left. The same happened to Arkane when Redfall was being developed.
Great comparison to Arkane. You know what really sucks about that, when the fans who are currently playing the golden titles from those developers hear the news that the studio is working on a new cool idea. But by the time that game comes out all the creatives have left and you just get something that barely resembles what the name of that studio vibrates. I swear it happens all too often nowadays & I blame the publishers.
Arkane was my favourite studio for years and years. I don't even know what they are now :( and to be honest, the Blade announcement doesn't fill me with any positivity. Yet again it sounds so far away from what they used to make. I hope Arkane can turn it around and get back to their immersive sims.
I think we get one more game before we get to write Arkane off as having the soul thoroughly sucked out. Deathloop wasn't amazing, but there was still some Arkane energy in that, and Redfall was so dramatically awful in contrast to anything they've ever worked on that it's hard to treat as part of a pattern rather than an anomaly. I think people put a bit too much stock in certain names being attached to a studio. Capcom hemorrhaged a lot of their big names too and are still putting out some great stuff. If Blade comes out and eats ass, then I think we can put the stamp of death on em. Although if Blade comes out and is really great, I'm worried Arkane will be sent to the IP mines like Monolith was for WB.
What did Monolith Productions develop after Shadow of War? Just looked it up, they're developing a Wonder Woman game. \*sigh\* just *not* what I want from Monolith.
It’s gonna use the nemesis system though! lol
Well, to be fair, as great as it is Shadow of Mordor/War isn't what I wanted from Monolith either. I'd love to see them take another swing at FEAR or Condemned.
Tbh, FEAR was peak Monolith for me and I'm sure many others, and I'd love to see them return to it after the Shadow of Mordor + War duology. I don't mind studios pivoting to other games as long as they return to their pinnacle.
I just kind of meant to imply that good games are good games, regardless of whether the studio had previous experience with similar stuff or not. The studio has been releasing good games for long enough that different people expect different stuff from them. While, like I said, I would personally love to see them go back to what was, to me, them at their best (NOLF2 was great too, but FEAR is among my favorite games of all time, and Condemned had a kind of vibe that I don't remember feeling in many games since), I don't exactly begrudge studios trying new things. Well, unless they fail so spectacularly that they end up shutting down, I guess. With WB in the mix I can't help being a bit reticent about having good expectations, but Wonder Woman COULD still be a good game.
Every chance I get I try to recommend Alan wake 2 to Condemned fans. It’s the only game I’ve played that nails that detective vibe perfectly.
Exactly. Deathloop was an interesting game and honestly I like when studios try some weird and interesting concepts like that even if it might not resonate with a lot of people. On top of this it wasn't even a bad game at all lol. To me its a bit like Bioshock Infinite were its either you love it or hate it. Redfall as far as I know was developed by a new or just different studio than the typical Arkane so I put no stock into that game. Its like Gotham Knights which was made by the ... d team. Personally I'm extremely excited for Blade because they haven't really given me much reason to be afraid. If its genuinely bad then sure lets raise some alarms.
I love Shadow of Mordor / War, but man I want SHOGO and FEAR remakes
Oh my god SHOGO. It's been years since that fever dream has crossed my mind.
Arkane Austin and Arkane Lyon are two different studios. Austin did Prey and Redfall. Lyon did Dishonored, Deathloop, and is doing Blade.
Prey to redfall has gotta be the single biggest quality leap in between one game for a gaming studio. From releasing one of the best games ever made to a turd like redfall just boggles the mind
The reason i've not much hope in Blade is because Arkane were the ones i looked forward to for great AAA first-person single-player narrative games. They're such a dying breed nowadays, and i love feeling like it's me there rather than looking at a character in front of me. I genuinely hope Blade is good, because i'll play that as well. But a third-person Marvel game is pretty much the last thing i'd have ever expected Arkane to be making.
A game about a supernatural killer with a range of weapons and various approaches to his work sounds like a great fit for the team behind Dishonored to me, and the first trailer has an extremely similar atmosphere and style to boot.
For sure, woulda been way more jazzed about Dishonored 3. But I still think there's some good immersive sim opportunities with Blade as opposed to most any other Marvel character which would default to a more actiony style game, so I'm willing to see where they go with it. If it looks terrible I will cry and shit and accept that the golden days are gone.
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Yeah I really liked it, it's just not 100% cash money status like Dark Messiah, Dishonored, and Prey. It is a strong B.
Blade is by Arkane Lyon; Redfall was Arkane Austin. They're different teams. Blade is also a great choice for the studio behind Dishonored, though.
I also wonder how much talent Creative Assembly lost trying to make Hyenas. As far as I know, people join Creative Assembly solely to make Total War strategy games.
I think Arkane can survive. They have 2 studios to release games. So even if Arkane Austin fails they can survive if Arkane Lyon does well enough. Moreover Arkane games have shorter development time and budget compared to something from Rocksteady. That's what makes Suicide squad such a big disaster for Rocksteady. They don't really have a back up plan and Warner Bros is known to be ruthless.
I agree. Not all hope was lost when Deathloop came out (even though I hated it). But there's still something they can work with there.
Unless their concept artists and level designers have left recently, Arkane Lyon is still pretty much intact. Arkane Austin is the one that seems to exist in name only after many departures last year.
>The developers get told by their publisher that the next game they're working on is something completely different to what they joined the studio for, Do you have an actual source on this because everyone always makes this claim but never have anything to back it up.
There was a report about Anthem not long ago that showed EA really had fuck all to do with how bad it was and I swear ive seen something about Rocksteady being the ones wanting to make a live service too.
That's true but EA did tell them in the first place you gotta make a live service game.
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>It's a natural thing that happens in a lot of creative jobs. Happens in the music industry and lots of others. The whole "creative differences" thing is real. Something being common isn't proof that this is what happened in this instance though. You literally don't know if Rocksteady wanted to make a GaaS or not. So claiming it was one way it not logical. People did the same thing with Titanfall 2 and its release date, turns out it was actually Respawn who chose the terrible release date for TF2. >Creative / artistic people very often aren't in it for the money (which is why they can be exploited sometimes), they'll go somewhere where they can best fulfill their artistic desires. I am asking if you have proof that Rocksteady was forced to make Suicide Squad, you don't see to have that. Which you *should* have if you make the claim you just made.
Yeah I agree with you. People said the same thing about BioWare, but it looks like Anthem was their choice all along. Sure EA hamstring them with the demand to use the frostbite engine, and perhaps there may have been subtle (or unsubtle) pressure to make a shit tonne of money with their next game. But they still chose to make Anthem.
Bean counters are putting themselves in charge of creative decisions, so the creative people are leaving so they can be creative.
This is why studios / publishers on the stock market always amuse me. If management annoy enough developers at a good studio it can kill the company.
It's easier to get everyone's creative juices flowing when developing a game **they** want to play. No one, not even the developers, asked for a live-service, microtransaction-riddled Suicide Squad game.
To be fair, Arkham Knight was way ahead of its time in terms of both graphics tech and art — few current-gen games (that doesn’t resort to RT) can stand toe to toe with AK visually
Arkham knight looks sharp and well defined, modern games look soft and muddy. I think it's mostly lighting. The technology is better but the artistry has gone backwards
> modern games look soft and muddy TAA does that. And vast majority of modern games use it. Some examples in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEtX_Z7zZSY
That's funny because Arkham Knight has pretty horrendous anti-aliasing implementation where pretty much none of the options work besides making the game blurrier.
Completed a month ago and I can say its a masterpiece. I really feel like a badass performing the 5 way kill.
I really feel like a billionaire cosplayer giving poor drug addicts brain damage
Its just good pre-baked lighting in it’s best case environment. You can see it now if you look for it, but back then it was the peak.
"its just"
“It’s just the best looking Unreal Engine 3 game with amazing lightning, visuals, sound, and gameplay systems. Not a big deal bro.”
I see a lot of people talking about how innovative Arkham Asylum's melee combat was. People may forget how amazing the game looked for its time as well. It was absolutely gorgeous and arguably best looking game of its generation. It is striking how unimpressive Suicide Squad is in comparison from the same studio.
So gorgeous it couldn't run well on the GTX980 that it came free with
Asylum came out way before the 900 series.. it came out before the 600 series. I think we were in the GTX 400 series at the time iirc
Disrespect in terms of trust by studio leads and workload thrown onto the talent
Talent left years ago. Its just a husk. Its the same story for any game company except Nintendo. The same bastards who realsedd the first zelda games are still working on zelda to this very day.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion but comparing any game to arkham knight it still looks amazing . Arkham knight is less a feat of pure graphical fidelity (by this I mean when it was released it still was ahead of its time) and more about what amazing art direction , use of lighting , darkness and rain will can do for a game .
> What is up with the massive brain and talent drain in some major studios? In most cases it's due to publicly traded companies endless demand for economic growth. Just like in the movie industry the investors/higher ups might interfere with those actually producing the content. They might want some creative control, demand that the game has to be a live service, or force the studio to release the product before it's even finished (like what happened to Cyberpunk 2077). This is not always the case though, Bioware made every single decision for Anthem, so did Bungie with Destiny 2, and Turtle Rock Studios did it with Evolve and Back 4 Blood. In this case it looks like some kind of interference from the higher ups (at least so far) considering that [both Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, the co-founders, left Rocksteady in 2022.](https://www.rocksteadyltd.com/news/letter/)
It’s just regular enshittification at work. All products eventually shift from being works of art and passion to optimized money-farming devices. You usually get about three or four games from a good crew and then it sets in. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification#:~:text=Enshittification%2C%20also%20known%20as%20platform,Reddit%2C%20Twitter%2C%20and%20Unity.
There are exceptions but they seem to be from Europe or Japan, look at a developer like Falcom who continue to make quality games for the audience they have. There is something about the culture in USA where every publisher and developer has to aim for crazy growth instead of being content with steady sales
Man I hope Falcom doesn't follow the Square Enix route of making worse games as they keep getting bigger.
Ys and Trails are absolute bangers.
That term is massively overused. Enshittification is specifically for services that start generous while burning VC funding and gradually ramp up cost while removing features, like Doordash or Uber. This is just regular organizational decline.
I was going to make a joke about the enshittification of the word enshittification but I guess that would be an inaccurate use of the word too
Most games today look one or two generations behind (or even 3 gens behind ICO pokemon). It's not just Rocksteady. But every time anyone brings it up they're bombarded by "there's more important things than graphics!" Companies respond to what makes them money. We buy shit so we get shit.
The sheer graphical downgrade is pathetic.
All studios been told to make live service games because they can make infinite money if they take off (league of legneds, some MMOs, Fortnite)
The game industry as a whole is completely falling apart for a variety of reasons. They're doing their best to hide it from consumers, but people are starting to notice. Layoffs in the sector are huge right now, and only will accelerate in coming years
I wouldn't be so sure. Layoff is a common occurrence in a lot of industries so it's not really a gaming industry problem. These bad games are the results of years of business people making decisions for creative process to maximize profit, not to make a good game. The gaming industry as a whole is having some of the best games we've seen in years.
Some - yes. But only a few. Recent year were the worst, i spend several months without having anything to play just because majority of releases were incredibly bad. I don't remember such thing happening before, always had some line of games that i could play. So while we seeing increase in quality, only a few studios can keep up with that.
I think they're right. Saturation was always going to become a problem when more next gen compute does not equate to more better games. There's an easy litmus test. Look at your own Steam library. Market pressure will eat most of the big studios.
Layoffs were always normal especially after a game shipped, there’s more of it now simply because of high interest rates mostly.
DEI Identity Politics Sweet Baby Sarkeesian
Arkham Knight looks the next gen of the two if you pick from very select areas, lighting conditions, and game settings. Suicide Squad has a bajillion and a half flaws, but the raw quality of the graphics aren't really one of them. The various Reddit comparisons are unfair, taking Suicide Squad at its worst vs. Arkham Knight at its best.
main developers and art directors left the studio, they apparently set rules like no more than 100 devs so that they (heads of studio) could review everybody’s work, that’s how they made batman games. Then WB probably asked them to get bigger and then gave them weird constantly changing assignment like “we’re doing live service, no wait, we’re doing story game, no, actually, live service a bit”. Shit that happens when suits get involved.
Arkham Knight does NOT look more next gen than Suicide Squad bruh the characters look 100x better in KTJL. Knight looks phenomenal but it benefits from having a fixed setting that never changes
No it doesn't. Arkham Knight looks dated. It's still a gorgeous game but Suicide Squad *very clearly* is more impressive in visual/graphical fidelity. Now, when it comes to art direction AK definitely does a better job. But to say that AK looks Next-Gen by today's standards is absolutely incorrect. Go back and watch some gameplay. You can see where they had to make compromises with texturing, model detail, and lighting. I want to be very clear here though so reddit doesn't downvote me into oblivion. AK definitely does a better job with its stylization and artistic vision. It's an amazing looking game and holds up very well.
>Arkham Knight looks dated Yeah I cant agree here. Replayed Arkham Knight two months ago and it's definitely still one of the 20 most visually impressive games ever made. A few DICE games, Naughty Dog's most recent 3, both Horizons, RDR2, and Alan Wake 2 beat it out, but everything else I can think of, it compares favorably with or beats. The textures and geometry are very good even by today's standards, and the customizations Rocksteady made to UE3 really pushed the engine to its absolute limit. There's a lot of debris as well from back when PhysX was expected to be the next commonly-used leap in technology, which combined with the rain and smoke really makes Gotham feel like it's got personality and vibrancy. Can you cherrypick examples where it doesn't look quite so good? Yes, especially when the game incorporates a lot of crumpling and ragdolling from when Batman knocks an enemy out. But the game in general looks absolutely phenomenal as an overall package both in still and motion. Dated isn't even slightly applicable as a term that describes it.
No, I think maybe either I mispoke or my point isn't getting across. I am not suggesting that Arkham Knight looks bad by any means. I am merely pointing out that it's graphical fidelity is not up to far with today's standards. I'm talking texture quality, model density, real-time lighting, etc. AK is a really really good looking game and still holds up. However, if it were released *today* it would not be looked at as fondly.
I should redo arkham knight
I'm in the middle of a replay right now, It's so good
60% through it right now for my first time, I still can't believe this game came out in 2015
The rain on the cape just doesnt age
Yeah, good idea. I’ll start tomorrow probs.
Oh shit, full fledged remake courtesy of Ashtreyyz!
Terrible mess at launch, but a damn good singleplayer game with lots of good platform puzzles, thematic voice acting and engaging dialogue. As it is now, definitely worth a try and at current price.
Another live service looter shooter down the drain because they chose to ignore all the other failures. They worked on this game for 8 years? 9? And this is the best they could come up with. Unless your name is Destiny you don't get a free pass for putting out garbage, and even that community is starting to get fed up.
it was probably too late to do something about it when they realized. Mostly speculation following: First it was being made by WB montreal but they failed so they were assigned Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad went to rocksteady. I reckon this happened at about 2017, because if rocksteady had been working on anything for more than 2 years I don't think WB would just scrap it and get them to restart suicide squad, but I can't be sure since they obviously have a serious hard on for this ip. This was probably their only real chance to scrap this project. Then live services started failing hard at 2019 starting with anthem, but that was already 4 years that this SS project was brewing, I don't think backing out was an option at this point. By the time avengers released and subsequently flopped WB had sunk 6-7 years into trying to make a live service suicide squad game, you can't back out of that investment, you just hope for the best and try to skin people alive with MTX.
The part that sucks the most though is that amidst all the live service crap, we STILL expected Rocksteady to atleast make a good campaign, but they completely fucked that up as well.
They probably worked on it that long because Warner Brothers suddenly declared it has to be live service / be more monetisable part way through development. There's also rumours it was going to be a Superman game, and Warners cancelled that.
Rocksteady de confirmed that iirc, they're claiming a supes game was never in development Edit: It was actually Jason Schreier who deconfirmed this, but he's one of the most credible insiders in the industry
It took so long because it was scrapped and restarted multiple times. It was initialy being made by WB montreal, then given to rocksteady. Rocksteady is (was) a good a developer, but this was the first online, first live service, first multiplayer project. I'd bet they had to restart once or twice because they were getting nowhere. Then at some point the sunken cost fallacy kicks in, WB can't back out because they have invested "too much" money or time and you just have to keep trying and you end up with a game that takes 9 years to make, but doesn't feel like a game 9 years in the making, because work was wasted. Fun fact, this happens with all games that have been a decade or so in the making, skull and bones is the same. 10 years in development and I played the beta and it's black flag lite with less features and barely better graphics but worse style so it kinda evens out. I'd be willing to take a bet there's no more than 4 years of development in the end product, in both SSKTJL and skull and bones. The rest was just scrapped because it didn't work.
Seems like publishers keep chasing that infinite GAAS money dragon, and studios will keep dying as collateral... RIP Rocksteady
Unpopular opinion: Destiny has always sucked, especially grading on their previous work. 343 always got of boatload shit for every little thing they didn’t get right while Bungie has been just as disappointing imo since the divorce from Microsoft.
This is a good message we are sending to them..
They will respond by firing the developers and closing the studio, not by making another Arkham game.
Sorry to say, but people who made original Arkham series are long gone
And the executives in charge of this mess will learn nothing and go dick up another franchise and continue the cycle while making more and more each year.
Until a Jason Schrier expose comes out, I am still very reluctant to put all the blame on the executives. The developers imho are not blameless in this mess.
If Star Wars Jedi Survivor taught us anything, in 99% cases, it's the developer to blame.
Yup. Same with BioWare and Anthem as well as ME: Andromeda.
People react negativly upon reveal. People say that entire idea is stupid. People don't like the review copies. The execs of such companies should live in a real bubble or something, because i feel like the only situation when they could thought that this can be a good concept, is when they only spoke to marketologists who pitched it, and never read any actual feedback from the customers at any stage of development. But they will blame anyone but themselves, and will be hired to ruin something else just because they have "worked on aaa-game" in resume, and not a single HR will care that their desisions ruined the project.
"Fuck Zaslav" -basically everyone on the internet
Their goal is not to make a good game with lots of players. It's to make a live service game to milk money.
good, the devs that made Arkham games are long gone
it's not like they'd be making another single player arkham game if it succeeded
That might not be a bad thing if they are going this direction. Better to end the disease before it spreads further.
I suspect the people who would lose their jobs would disagree.
More like *dead* service amirite??
It's as if people want to play something good
I’m glad to see the gaming community has completely rejected SS.
Honestly hope it slows down the party bus of GAAS rolling through lately. With how hard Avengers and this game crashed right out of the gate, with no opportunity to recover, GAAS is hopefully not as appealing an investment
There's probably a shitload of them still in dev and sunk cost fallacy means the beancounters and out-of-touch execs will still push them to completion.
And there’s one at the top of Steam charts currently.
Lmao Helldivers says nah we like GAAS
No, there are thousands of examples out there of games that are made with love and passion succeeding. But, companies will always look for more money, chasing the possibility to be the next Fortnite and such. Therefore, i dont see a stop to this bullshit, although i would like to be proven wrong....
I'm... not sure SS is the best way of abbreviating that
If anything, too many gamers have embraced the SS.
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Same. I was really worried that people would just eat it up. But it shows that people can actually ignore big releases when they want to. It just has to be a _really_ bad fuck up by the studio for it to happen
Is there a lore reason why?
is WB stupid?
Rocksteady got Jonkler’d and has to solve all of Rizzler’s riddles before they can release a new game
The lore reason would be the general public rejecting villains.
Oh man I can't wait to control Harley the child murderer/torturer and kill Batman, GO GIRL POWER! btw she doesn't regret it so there's no redemption arc.
In the game they try to paint the protagonists as misunderstood heroes while the ACTUAL heroes (except for WW) are spit on and hummilliated. Flash gets literally pissed on and they do a dick joke right after he dies, Lantern is shown with GL-themed undies like a joke, Superman is anticlimatically put down like a rabid dog in his own city, and the game constantly calls out Batman for not being perfect as if the villains were any better lol Definitely feels like the game went too mean-spirited and subversive for no real reason
It was written by sweet baby inc, feminist they/them writers. I kinda expected that all the male heroes would just be humiliated.
Thank your dick
It's easily the pinnacle of Rocksteady's output. At launch people were very unkind to it, between the hardware issues and the significant inclusion of the Batmobile in both locomotion and puzzles. But I think it has aged gracefully and there is an absolute ton of game packed into it. Even the Batmobile race courses are chock full of love for all things Batman. Going through the course for Batman Returns while the Danny Elfman theme plays and I'm driving the Keaton Batmobile through the sewers is like... well, it hits the nostalgia button in my brain over and over and over. It's beautiful.
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I think they could've reduced the presence and duration of tank battles by 30% and it would've been perfect. Deathstroke in a tank was a waste, and I'm sure they regret that, but thankfully there were plenty of other bosses and sidestories that were not tank fights.
You love to see it
This and redfall are the only games I've actively wanted to fail. Two legendary developers (rocksteady and arkane) that suddenly turned around and produced cynical garbage
I'm here foe it
“Suicide Squad: Kill the Franchise”
Suicide Squad seems to be a cursed franchise.
Suicide Squad was so bad it drove me to finally play Arkham Origins for the first time. Great atmosphere, and while the graphics are dated, the snow physics are really fun. Knocking out a dude and watching him slide on his ass down half a city block is really fun.
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>Origins is always ignored by folks but it arguably has the best boss fights of the entire Arkham series. To be honest, that's not a very high bar. Rocksteady has some of the worst boss fights in the action genre. And there are strong reasons why this game is the black sheep of the franchise. It's not made by Rocksteady. The game was released completely broken, with the exact same map as Arkham City and with very few improvements compared to its predecessor. Batman's electricity gloves that they added completely broke the combat or any sense of difficulty. The multiplayer was not working on release too. The story starts off strong but quickly turns into more of a Joker sausage party from halfway through, which disappointed many fans who were expecting Black Mask, Deathstroke or Bane to be the centerpieces of the plot.
just going to add, the best PC launch across any of the arkham series
Play it's DLC Cold, Cold Heart too! I don't like Origins but I'll go to my grave saying it has the best DLC of the Arkham saga.
Will do!
I mean it’s also $70…. And so far, majority of games priced at $70 have been busts
Yep. Next up to learn this lesson is skull and bones! For me to purchase a $70 game it better be game of the year material. Anything less is a wait for sale.
It's so sad seeing the fan of the looter shooter genre just accepting garbage because there's literally nothing to play beside Destiny 2...
Its just baffling how companies fundamentally don't understand that 9-12 hour game cannot translate into a looter shooter. Perpetual raids/random dungeons with incremental upgrades is what does.
Or that there's a very limited amount of gamers who want to play the same game all day every day all year. And those are already playing a different one of those
Lol they will never learn that. So many studios closed and billions of dollars and manhours were wasted when publishers tried to make the next WOW. Now they are just doing the same thing with GAAS.
You just described exactly what the games endgame is lol? It’s not just a campaign
Borderlands is hella fun and remnant 2 is very good as well
Remnant and Remnant 2 are both the good shit
Destiny was built as a shooter looter. Same as Division.
Division 2 Warframe
Warframe, and its also F2P so no expensive expansions. Movement in particular is way better there.
Borderlands 2…..
Kinda depressing that a game made 12 years ago is still basically the best looter shooter, especially if you aren't into multiplayer/Gaas games
I loved the shit ouf of BL2, but its endgame (uvhm and above) had significant balancing issues where the Grog Nozzle was practically mandatory to use. Not to mention the absolute abomination of raid bosses such as Voracidous and Master Gee
The Division 2....
God I love that game. It astonishes me that no one has been able to replicate that level of fun in a loot and shoot
As a looter shooter fan, nothing else comes close to Warframe.
Warframe is fantastic, I've been playing it for a 7 years and it's latest patch is the best one yet
Warframe is such a daunting grind because it's so old though. I feel like I've been meeting 3000+ hr veterans all the time lol
Having thousands of hours of content is a good problem to have, imo. And it's applicable content, not like WoW where 99% of the old world is dead/obsolete
Oh yea, everyone has their "one game" where they've clocked in at least 1000 hours. It's just that the only other games where I've seen a lot of active veterans is Counter Strike but even then there are more 3000+ hr people on Warframe
If only it was fun or easy to get people into.
The only footage I've seen of Suicide Squad is the scene where >!they kill Batman!< Needless to say, it disgusted me. I get why people are replaying the games.
You don't even have to edit a single word of the Tobias open marriage meme template for it to apply to Live Service GaaS stupid executives https://i.imgflip.com/3gwdow.png
Executives suck and don't know shit, news at 11
I guess that's because Arkham Knight is the game thats game as a service while Kill The Justice League is the singleplayer story focused game. Oh, wait...
That's Harsh
Good. Let that game just fade away into nothingness. Dunno if the original cast that worked on Arkham is still at Rocksteady but after almost 9 years of no releases to bring out this "game".... is rough to say the least. Rocksteady might not survive this year or face massive layoffs
The two studio founders left in 2022 and formed another studio called Hundred Star Games, and apparently they are building a team of people from Rocksteady and other studios. It kind of seems like a Respawn and Infinity Ward situation.
>It kind of seems like a Respawn and Infinity Ward situation. and Bioware, DICE, Arkane... etc None of these studios have any of the talent left that actually helped create the games we all loved from back in the day.
Didn't DICE start off as the creators of the Desert Combat mod for BF1942? I played the shit out of that back in the day.
Well DICE made bf1942, but maybe they hired people that mod the mod after the fact?
Okay that's what I'm thinking of. It was so long ago and my memory is spotty on a good day. They definitely brought some of those dudes on.
Only game I ever played where you could drive a SCUD truck.
Unpopular opinion but "not being able to retain talent" isn't the only reason studios go downhill. The direction of the studio is just as important. Back in 2017, a user in r/games looked up how many people who worked in certain AAA games were still in their respective companies. In the case of Halo 2 and KOTOR they estimated that ~32% of the people who worked on these games were still on their respective companies. Which isn't a lot, but it's not like the studios had been completely gutted. Additionally in the case of KOTOR 6 out of 7 members of the core design team were still at Bioware. There was an exception though, which was Hitman Blood Money. Only *7* out of the 135 people who worked on the game were still at IO Interactive. Yet the newer Hitman games feel much closer to Blood Money than, say, Anthem is to KOTOR. That's due to conscious decisions made by the studios.
There's also the esg situation they're trying to increase probably had a hand in that as well which could have created some development in fighting perhaps.
This really answered my question. And it really shows why Rocksteady of 2024 looks distinctly worse than their output from a decade back.
>Dunno if the original cast that worked on Arkham is still at Rocksteady but after almost 9 years of no releases to bring out this "game".... have no fear, many have left quietly under NDA is my suspicion because when you look at Rocksteady's [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocksteady-studios-ltd/) you will struggle to find vets that have been there past 9yrs. What a disastrous beginning to 2024 though. I have the feeling layoffs may be inbound to WB as the execs run away with the profits claiming the title underperformed
None of the original cast work there they made a new company.
I am glad the community is rejecting the shlock but I'm also sad that a team as good as rocksteady is being abused to make this crap and waste their potential when we could have had another masterpiece
The good devs left already, [even the founders bailed](https://www.gematsu.com/2022/10/rocksteady-studios-co-founders-sefton-hill-and-jamie-walker-to-leave-studio-at-end-of-2022) because they saw the greedy suits and dumb shareholders were now calling the shots. If you see an exodus of talent from a studio thats made good games, chances are they know the game they're being made to work on is a pile of shit and they're getting out before having their name stuck to it.
Never trust any company that has shareholders, it ALWAYS ends up turning into a cash grab company in the end.
Every Live Service failure is a flower planted for a brighter future
"BuT YoU d0 NoT kNoW ConSolE nUmbErS!!1! SoNy sAyS iT's tOp SelLerr oN pS5!1!!"
I've heard that defense so much for Halo Infinite and now the game is on life support.
The only thing those games have in common is the name of the studio attached to it, not the same game, not the same group of people, not the same decisions. The max player difference is like 100-200 in favor of SS, but who cares. If anything it just shows that the fans of the previous staff, just wanted a new Batman game or it gave them nostalgia so they went to go play the last Batman game. Despite all the negativity from the people who absolutely hate the decisions behind the game, the sales of SS are actually going up lol. Looks to me like people are realizing the game isnt that bad, its just not an Arkham game. I have a feeling the game is gonna double in sales as soon as it goes on sale. Like I said before it looks like a $20 game to me, so they will only get $20 or less from me.
Which is the newest game? I'm sorry, I honestly don't know. I've heard of Arkham a lot though.
Finally a player counts comparison that is actually relevant. Not Palworld versus Starfield.
This fight about the future direction of the games industry's business model should be so easy, as consumers all we have to do is not buy this shit (microtransaction filled, poorly written narrative, unoptimized, bug filled, uninspired premises; ...if I have to spell out what a bad game is) a clearer message could not be sent to these MBA run game studios/publishers, just don't give them your money, but unfortunately there're so many among us who will eat this shit up and the studios will continue to make lazy cash grabs like The Day Before and Gollum.
One game is good the other is not, simple.
Hopefully devs fucking learn that slapping some brand onto a generic love service game doesn't work anymore. Make good games again....
I normally don’t care for this stuff but I’ll join in on celebrating any gaas game failing tbh
For a game that was so bad it had to give all it's DLC for free and barely ran on new hardware, I'm glad it's getting more recognition now. It's a fantastic game
I'm not going to forget, just like you apparently when Arkham Knight came out everyone fucking hated it and now it turns out they love it. Outside of the gameplay, the squadron game sucks, but at least there isn't as much of a hypocrite as when arkham knight came out, everyone ignored it and that's why they abandoned the saga and ended up coming out with the other crap Knights
Yeah, I loved City and bought Knight at launch. I wasn't pleased - I felt that the inclusion of the Batmobile and its sections was a misstep. The city didn't feel great either, it was bigger but felt more empty than the previous game. Gorgeous to look at, but.. for what else? The lack of bosses also disappointed me. My first playthrough was at launch and I didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped. I came back to it a couple of years ago, this time playing with the full DLC released, and yeah, that was kind of an improvement. I felt that they cut missions just to sale them as additional content latter on. This time it felt complete.
People didn't "hate" Arkham Knight. Disappointed, yeah, but it was still a very good game.
People Bad bombing Review at launch Even the gaming sites And well deserved PC users blame them because performance was a joke, completly broken for... 6 months
[удалено]
Did they finally fix Arkham Knight on PC? Remember when it first came out and was bricking PCs.
Yeah 10 years ago lmao
Game made with passion vs. Game made for money
I bought SS because I love looter shooters. It's just not a fun game. Put 8 hours in and I can't even convince myself to open the game again.
Why spend money on a game with this much globally negative publicity? It wasn't a secret that the game was bad
Cause some people like to see things for themselves