Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad Recreation Is Completed—Now What?

The Suicide Squad is useless, type of. Lengthy stay the Suicide Squad… type of.

Nearly a full 12 months after its launch, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League got here to an finish this week with its final main replace. Mentioned ending is a little bit of an odd duck: after lastly whittling down the ultimate Brainiac’s well being bars, gamers watch an animated cutscene narrated by Harley Quinn whereby the Squad and the dwelling, now-free Justice League members who Brainiac had cloned—and had been on the receiving finish of the Squad’s sometimes juvenile brutality—crew as much as take the Coluan down earlier than going off to set the whole lot proper, each of their universe and others the varied Brainaics terrorized. It’s a considerably definitive finish that additionally feels prefer it got here out of the blue, particularly when you concentrate on how rapidly Warner Bros. wished to wash its palms of this undertaking.

In any case, the query hovering round Suicide Squad is “what’s subsequent,” notably for Rocksteady. The reply is straightforward, but in addition not, once we have a look at the studio’s contemporaries. After failing to get its Anthem rework going, BioWare pivoted to remastering the Mass Effect trilogy and starting full improvement on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Going by that logic, you’d assume we’d be due some Batman: Arkham remasters to ease Rocksteady again into the single-player swing, however Return to Arkham exists, and Arkham Knight turns 10 years previous this June. (WB Montreal, which made Arkham Origins, helped with Squad’s improvement and recently cut staff, as did Rocksteady shortly after.) Final June, sources instructed Bloomberg Rocksteady’s instant future helps put collectively a director’s reduce of 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy, then… we don’t know, however it’s presumably a single-player mulligan to get the studio again on monitor.

On-line, the favored expectation and hope is one other Batman recreation, ideally one which simply writes Suicide Squad off as non-canon or doesn’t handle it. By now, wouldn’t the studio be higher served getting out of the Batman gap and tackling one other DC hero? Earlier than Squad’s launch, numerous (and later debunked) rumors claimed Rocksteady was making a Superman recreation, and of this recreation’s excessive factors, its recreation of Metropolis is taken into account fairly good. And if not the Man of Metal, actually another hero who isn’t Surprise Girl would do at this level. By now, this crew’s been engaged on Batman for simply over 15 years, and it’s greater than time to let somebody new take a crack on the cowl, both in Gotham’s current or future.

Alternatively, it would do Rocksteady some good to get out of the DC cage fully and make its personal factor. Up to now, its sole non-DC recreation is its debut title, 2006’s City Chaos: Riot Response. One thing model new in all probability ought to’ve been the path to go after Knight, however that is nearly as good a possibility as any to maneuver on. Returning to the Arkham nicely as soon as extra would solely make issues ever weirder than it was once we realized this was canon to these video games. Making the crew spend years and thousands and thousands of {dollars} making a single-player apology isn’t the most effective use of anybody’s time, and it’s not like we aren’t getting one other Bat-game finally. For all of the fears of us have had about Insomniac changing into a Marvel video games machine, that’s very a lot occurred with Rocksteady, which is clearly stuffed with gifted individuals who ought to get the chance to unfold their wings. Just lately, Naughty Dog and Ryu Ga Gatoku teased out their first wholly new properties in years, and I’d be curious to know what Rocksteady may make exterior the confines of a well-known comedian ebook property. Wouldn’t or not it’s fascinating to see what an unique sci-fi, horror, western, or no matter else recreation seems to be like from this crew?

In a good world, Suicide Squad would get to get out on higher, much less compromised phrases, or on the very least, Rocksteady wouldn’t be caught footing the invoice for it. As is, we will solely hope WB and its management will simply let the sport studio determine what it desires to do with what it’s greatest at, and prepare dinner from there. Different studios have recovered from worse, however the capacity to stroll away from lower than stellar titles isn’t being afforded for each developer today, and that may be a crappy full circle second for a crew that’s constructed up lots of goodwill to this point.

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