 Rocksteady's latest follow-up to the Arkham series, Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, is something very different entirely. A radical departure for a studio that has built a reputation on tight-focused single-player narratives, the new Suicide Squad instead attempts to marry classic Rocksteady gameplay with live-service multiplayer community elements. The result is a little bit messy, to say the least. Despite its, or perhaps because of, its status as one of the most anticipated games of the year, Suicide Squad has received something of a negative reaction from fans, many of whom have flooded the internet with comments saying that this game just did not live up to their expectations. Indeed, the writing has been on the wall for a while, with fans expressing concern that the project didn't seem to live up to Rocksteady's normally very high standard of quality. Before I go any further into this, I want to say an enormous thank you to my friend James, aka Hot Sider, who has helped tremendously with this project. Not only did he film all of the gameplay footage that you see in this video, he also bounced some ideas back and forth with me as I was working on the video script and gave me some excellent quotes that you'll be hearing later on. You may not know Hot Sider by name, but you've definitely seen his work because he is the go-to guy for video essay thumbnails in the video game sphere. He has his own channel and has made his own video on Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, and I absolutely recommend that you go and watch that one as well. Here we'll be covering the development of the game and things that may or may not have happened during the period of development, whereas in his video he talks specifically about what it's like to play the game and where he feels that it doesn't quite hold up. If I were to pick either this video or his to watch, I would probably recommend watching his instead, but then that's because I don't like looking at my own face. Someone in the comments already typing, yeah, I don't like looking at your face either. With that out of the way, what went wrong with Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League? In my opinion, they tried to do too much and tried to please too many people and ended up upsetting everybody in the process. Chapter 1. Crisis on Infinite Earths. Or is this a thing? I think this is a thing. There are a lot of rabbit holes that one could fall down when trying to research the development of a game, especially when trying to figure out exactly why a game failed to live up to its potential. Rocksteady's recent history, and indeed Warner Bros. Game's past decade, is full of potential rabbit holes. In researching this video I found myself wondering whether it was relevant, for example, that fans are convinced that Rocksteady's latest game had started life as a Justice League or Superman game instead, even though industry insiders have insisted that this is not the case. Or is it relevant, for example, that then-head of DC Jeff Jones announced a Suicide Squad game all the way back in 2012 when people assumed that it would tie into the David Ayer Suicide Squad film that released in 2016? Is it relevant, then, that Warner Bros. has been trying to get a Suicide Squad game out the door for over a decade at this point, whether or not they've got the resources in the studios available to do it? That being the case, is it then relevant that Warner Bros. Montreal, the developers of Arkham Origins, were at one point making a Suicide Squad game before that project was cancelled and Rocksteady started work on their own game? Is it relevant that Rocksteady co-founders Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker left the studio in 2022 and the game was mostly but not quite finished? Is it relevant that the game was delayed in 2023, ostensibly to add an extra level of polish immediately after an early preview led to widespread online backlash? And perhaps most alarmingly of all, is it relevant that in 2018, 10 of the 16 women employed by Rocksteady signed a letter calling out workplace harassment and a toxic environment? Or that former Rocksteady scriptwriter Kim McCaskill has since publicly claimed that she lost her job as a punishment for writing that letter and ultimately asked her name to be removed from the credits of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League and withdrew from consideration for the Women in Games Lifetime Achievement Award because Rocksteady is one of the awards more prominent sponsors. Is any of this strictly relevant? Perhaps and perhaps not, it's difficult to be certain and it's easy in hindsight to filter Rocksteady's rather tumultuous decade through the lens of an unpopular finished product. If Kill the Justice League had released a widespread critical and commercial acclaim, no one would be particularly concerned about reports of lead developers leaving the project or machinations within Warner Bros. or even toxic workplace harassment complaints. These things are just part of game development. If the end product turns out well, the ends justify the means, right? As it is, the Suicide Squad game has fallen short of many fans' expectations and with that comes a desire to find someone or something to blame. How much weight I really want to ascribe to any of the aforementioned factors is difficult to say, except that the kind of behaviour reported by Kim McCaskill is inappropriate in any workplace. I don't care if you really are making the best game ever. With all of that said, and bearing in mind that it is impossible to puzzle out everything that happened in any games development, whether good or bad, I find myself stuck looking at a single interview given to Play Magazine earlier this year. An interview in which studio project director Darius Sadegion makes two completely contradictory statements about what Kill the Justice League is even supposed to be. Because in reading Sadegion's words, it does sound awfully like Rocksteady bit off a bit more than they could chew, attempting to make a game that appealed to everyone, everywhere, no matter their gaming preferences. And as is very common in failed computer and video games, if you attempt to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. Chapter Two. Identity Crisis. Or what even is this? Before we go any further, I feel that we need to address the different types of players that are coming to Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. With a studio like Rocksteady that develops its own signature style, there comes a dedicated fan base. These kinds of fans are a two-edged sword for developers. On the one hand, they'll be a bit more forgiving of some things than the wider general masses, and on the other hand, they'll have very specific needs and desires, and will complain vociferously if they don't get exactly what they're asking for. These fans will be following a game's development very closely, eager for every new piece of news, and they will be the very first ones through the gate when the game is released, eager to try out something that they know has come from a studio that has proven successful in the past. Beyond that, you've got the laity, the less well-read mainstream audience. The vast majority of a consumer base will know significantly less about a product than the hardcore Die Hard fans. They won't necessarily be following the entire story of the development of a game, and once the game is out they will play it for a while while it is fun, and then be happy to move on to something else, where the Die Hards may stick around for a bit longer and build more of a community around a game. Neither of these approaches to a game is wrong, and we as gamers are a mainstream audience for some games, and a very niche audience for some other games depending on our own personal preferences. When building a community around a game, it's those Die Hards that really cement the bedrock of it, but it's the mainstream audience that keeps a game profitable for the long term. Of the two groups it is the mainstream gamers that make up the vast majority of the player base, and for that reason game studios often will aim at a mainstream audience first and foremost, and that can sometimes be to their detriment. After all, the Die Hards are probably going to buy your game either way, so you don't really need to worry too much about what they think of it, and even if they are turned off by a completely different radical change in the gameplay style, it doesn't matter because they're a small piece of the pie compared to that wider mainstream audience. In Making Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady were definitely attempting to appeal to a mainstream audience, and were also attempting to appeal to their hardcore fans, and herein lies the problem. Because the incumbent Rocksteady fanbase were interested in a tight, focused single-player narrative, and Warner Bros. Games were interested in appealing to a wider fanbase, a wider audience who were less tolerant of long cutscenes and just wanted something where buddies could kind of pal around together and joke in and explore in a space that didn't feel too bogged down in continuity. Said Sedeckian of the project brief for Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, Our goal is to build a community with this game. We want each player to feel like they're a part of Suicide Squad, and more broadly, a global Suicide Squad community. This has been at the core of our development, and the game has been built from the ground up as an experience that can be shared with friends. We have a variety of social features, rival taunts, the social squad, the friendly competition within the leaderboards, and we wanted to make a game where each player is connected to that larger community, and where we as developers get the opportunity to invite the community to evolve this game together with us. This focus on the community aspect of the game came up in another interview with Rocksteady Studios' production manager Jack Hackett, who said, When I'm playing online with my friends, I like to mess with them. I like to compete with them. I like to make fun of them. I like to taunt them. And if that makes sense when you're playing online as the squad, you can almost sort of roleplay as the squad, and that's really entertaining. They can do silly emotes, they can mess with each other, they can leave each other hanging for high fives and send taunts to the other players. I think that's a fun atmosphere to let people inhabit in a comic book world. Play with their friends, have fun, poke fun at each other, while still living authentically in that comic book world and feeling like you're inhabiting it. This is the kind of game that Rocksteady was building this time around, a game filled with co-op player interactions, with banter and taunts and palli jokes so that a group of friends can play this game endlessly night after night without getting bored. This game was meant as a community hub, and in this kind of game, the story, the characters, the narrative all kind of fade into the background to allow the players to fill in as much of their own story and narrative as they choose. But you know what, I imagine that if Rocksteady had just stuck to making that kind of game, they might have got a better reception from Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League. If they had actually fully committed to making something that was entirely devoted to online play, to cooperative play, to friends just getting along together and having fun, and not really worrying about the story or the environment or the wider context of why they were doing everything, then I think that this game probably wouldn't have necessarily appealed to that hardcore dedicated Rocksteady audience, but it would have found more widespread mainstream appeal. Whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing will depend on your personal preferences and how much you like the earlier Rocksteady titles. But as Sadegian points out in another quote from that Play Magazine interview, this game was not meant to be a GTA or a Fortnite. They wanted this to also have that Arkham flavour, and that meant a strong emphasis on story. He said, The foundation for all of our games is about understanding the characters and their unique personalities and using that as the core to build our gameplay systems. With a story driven game like ours, I think it's important to strike a balance that pushes the narrative forward but also gives you the choice to go off and explore other things if you feel like it. We don't really think of our games as fitting with any particular label. It's still full of the DNA that infuses the Batman Arkham series. Those foundations of story and character are absolutely central to our process. When Sadegian talks about this game it is clear just how important the story is meant to be within this title. He's hesitant to even call this a live service game because in the minds of Rocksteady employees this wasn't meant to be that. It was meant to be akin to that and maybe borrow ideas from other games of this kind of genre, but in their own unique Rocksteady way which still meant giving everybody a very strong narrative to follow and that in our essence is kind of where things clashed. Indeed from the sounds of it, that balance, getting the right ratio of story driven stuff and kind of more live service stuff is really where the challenge came in building this game for Rocksteady and where they might not have necessarily succeeded right off the bat is in getting that balance just right so that everybody is appeased. Here's another quote, this time from advanced combat designer Noel Chamberlain. At the core of Rocksteady's values is we want something really narrative driven and we're really story oriented. I think fans expect Rocksteady to do something slightly different and having you have to fight the Justice League and overcome this insurmountable challenge as a player and as a character in the story is really interesting. I think it's really exciting for players to experience. I think once players play it they'll know why this is our choice for the game. So this is Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, an attempt to marry live service elements with more traditional storytelling in games. That's a difficult balance to get right. There are not many games that really manage to marry the kind of co-op buddy type gameplay of a live service game with the kind of sprawling narratives that Rocksteady is famous for. Too much narrative, too many cutscenes and it's going to drag for people who really just want to play with their friends. Too little of those things and it's not going to feel satisfying or weighty enough for the fans who really just want a classic Arkham game. This being the case, this marriage being so difficult to achieve, why would Rocksteady attempt to do it in the first place? Why indeed? Chapter 3. Death in the Family or unrest in the House of Warner. In the 2023 third quarter earnings call for Warner Brothers Discovery, President and CEO David Zaslav had some very optimistic things to say about Warner Brothers games. He said, quote, we have worked really hard on our games business in the last year and a half. Oh, if you're wondering why the last year and a half in particular is relevant, that's when Warner Brothers and Discovery merged and when David Zaslav moved to his current position as head of the company. He's making a point of saying that under his leadership things have thrived, even though he's not necessarily counting everything that has happened before and the fact that none of these games were developed within a year and a half. Anyway, carrying on. We Believe Games is a critical and very valuable asset for the company with a great deal of potential for growth. Games has consistently enjoyed among the highest return of investments of any of our businesses. And while we're smaller than some of the leading pure play gaming companies, our operating margins are comparable to the best of the public companies. We're clearly punching above our weight and we're just getting started. Our focus is on transforming our biggest franchises from largely console and PC based, with three to four year release schedules, to include more always on gameplay through live services, multi-platform and free to play extensions, with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms. Ultimately, we want to drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels. It's worth mentioning that no matter how hard Warner Brothers has been working on games in the last year and a half, things are not ideal for the company as a whole. Zaslav has been somewhat, shall we say, aggressive with the decisions that he's made as the head of the company and has ended up axing entire finished films or at least almost finished films simply because he didn't feel like they were going to make enough money or revenue at the box office or even on streaming services to justify their completion and publication. While there have been several high profile films that have been axed by Warner Brothers before release, none sting quite as much as Batgirl starring Leslie Grace and Michael Keaton. This was a film which, by all counts, was not universally beloved by those who saw it early, but it was certainly one that fans were definitely looking forward to. While this is tremendously disappointing for comic book fans, you can kind of see where Warner Brothers is coming from given that only one of their superhero films released since 2019 has made more than five hundred million dollars at the box office, that one being The Batman starring Robert Pattinson. This indeed is not just a Warner Brothers problem, Marvel Studios also had a particularly bad year in 2023 amid rumblings and concerns among the industry that maybe fans are just kind of over superhero movies in general. This certainly does not just extend to comic book films, Spider-Man 2 has done very well for Sony, but Marvel's The Avengers hasn't really gone down very well and just so happens to also feature a large number of live service elements. With this being the case and with people increasingly treating these superhero multimedia outings as kind of the flavour of the week, kind of one and done, you enjoy it for a moment and then you move on to the next one without giving it another thought, you can kind of see the appeal of a live service game that would keep people coming back over and over and over over the course of several years. I mean obviously from a player perspective we absolutely love revisiting games that are well built, well made, have good stories and engaging gameplay, but it doesn't quite count the same for the companies if people aren't purchasing that game over and over in the way that you might get a live service game just kind of squeezing extra coins out of people as time goes on. All of this being the case, you can understand why Warner Brothers thought it was a good idea to try and get Rocksteady to make a Fortnite style game. There's logic there even if that logic is absolutely terrible from a consumer perspective. It's also just a little bit late because just as the superhero market feels very oversaturated and people kind of shift from one thing to another without really thinking about it or just allow things to pass them by entirely or think to themselves I'll catch that on Disney Plus or whatever, people have just kind of gone off the idea of investing everything they have into multiple different live service games. It's possible that the live service ecosystem is just a bit too crowded though this point, you've got the big hitters surely, but not every single game can be a hit because gamers only have a finite amount of time and they can't possibly play in every single game that they're offered. With these live service games it's almost so much less about the content of the game itself as it is about the camaraderie and the friendship of playing with your friends and so people aren't going to necessarily change to another one simply because a new game has a different set of skins or a different set of characters or a different type of gameplay when really all they're there for is something to keep their hands busy while they're chatting with their friends. I mean maybe I'm oversimplifying things but personally when I play a multiplayer online game I play for my friends rather than for the game itself. I couldn't actually care what we're playing I just want to spend time with people that I like. Indeed it's telling that in 2023 a lot of attention was heaped onto single player focused narrative games. Games like Spider-Man 2, a superhero game but also like Baldur's Gate 3 which doesn't feature any live service elements at all it's just pure solid single player action and there has been something of an increased desire and demand for these kinds of games almost as a response to the proliferation of live service titles. Indeed in his earnings call David Zaslav made a point of drawing attention to one of Warner Brothers biggest games of recent years Hogwarts Legacy which just so happens to be a single player narrative focused game. He said of this title quote, Our Harry Potter fans have immersed themselves in Hogwarts Legacy playing more than 700 million hours to date. That engagement helps not only our games business but also helps build and revitalize the entire Harry Potter franchise and we know our fans want even more. It is worth pointing out by the way that Harry Potter much like DC in general has been in a bit of a slump in recent years. Leaving aside entirely the controversy surrounding Harry Potter's author there's also been the issue that the Fantastic Beasts films just failed to find an audience and were somewhat lacklustre and unimpressive in general and this led to a slump and a decline in interest in Harry Potter across the board. As David Zaslav has pointed out Hogwarts Legacy has done something to correct this and there's been a lot more attention in Harry Potter of all varieties and across all different media as a result of the success of that game. With the DC films in something of a transitional period at the moment as things are reassessed and rebooted and reworked it would be really interesting to see how a very good DC game could potentially correct things for Warner Brothers in general and help their superhero division to thrive again and it would have been wonderful to see that with Suicide Squad kill the Justice League had this game not attempted to appeal to everyone and instead focused on what Rocksteady are really good at delivering. But that's just my two cents or indeed my one giant penny in the back cave. The moral of this story is twofold. One make sure that if you are good at something if you are enjoying something and if you are having a wonderful time making something you don't get too distracted by other people's expectations. Make sure that you focus on what you like to do rather than worrying about whether or not it'll appeal to absolutely everyone because you can't please absolutely everyone. Number two workplace harassment is inappropriate no matter the circumstances. That might not be the only thing that's been going on with Rocksteady in recent years but personally I can forgive a lackluster video game a lot easier than I can forgive allegations of inappropriate behavior in the workplace. Thank you for watching.