The Suicide Squad is dead, in a way. Long live Suicide Squad… sort of.
Almost a full year after its launch, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League came to an end this week with its last major update. Said ending is a bit odd: after finally whittling down the last of Brainiac’s health bars, players watch an animated cutscene narrated by Harley Quinn in which the Squad live, now free members of the Justice League cloned by Brainiac—and were on the receiving end of the Squad sometimes juvenile brutality— band together to take down Coluan before they go to set things right, both in their own universe and in others terrorized by the various Brainaics. It’s a somewhat definitive ending that also feels like it came suddenly, especially when you consider how quickly Warner Bros. wanted to clean his hands of this project.
Anyway, the question floats around Suicide Squad is “what’s next”, especially for Rocksteady. The answer is simple, but it is not, when we look at the contemporaries of the study. After failing to get his Anthem in the process of reworking, BioWare turned to remastering Mass effect trilogy and begins full development on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. By that logic, you’d think we’d need something Batman: Arkham remasters to get Rocksteady back into single player swing, but Return to Arkham there is, and Arkham Knight turns 10 this June. (WB Montreal, who made Arkham Origins, helped with squad development and recently reduced staffas he did Rocksteady shortly thereafter.) Last June, the sources said Bloomberg Rocksteady’s immediate future is helping put together the 2023 director’s cut. legacy of hogwarts, then… we don’t know, but it’s probably a single-player mulligan to get the studio back on track.
Online, the popular expectation and hope is another Batman game, preferably one that just writes Suicide Squad excluded as non-canonical or not addressed. By now, wouldn’t the studio be better off getting out of the Batman hole and tackling another DC hero? Ago squad edition, various (and later unmasked) rumors claimed that Rocksteady was working on a Superman game, and of the highlights of this game, its recreation of Metropolis is considered pretty good. And if not the Man of Steel, literally any hero other than Wonder Woman would do at this point. By now, this team has been working on Batman for just over 15 years, and it’s more than time to let someone new take over, whether in Gotham’s present or future.
Alternatively, it might help Rocksteady to completely break out of the DC cage and do their own thing. To date, his only non-DC game is his 2006 debut title Urban Chaos: A Response to Riots. Something completely new should probably have been the direction to go Knight, but this is just as good an opportunity to move on. Returning to Arkham so once again it would just make things even weirder than they were when we found out it was canon for those games. Making the team spend years and millions of dollars on an apology for one player isn’t the best use of anyone’s time, and it’s not like we won’t get another Bat-game possibly. For all the fears people had about Insomniac becoming a Marvel gaming machine, that’s largely what happened with Rocksteady, which is clearly full of talented people who should get a chance to spread their wings. Recently, Bad dog and Ryu Ga Gatoku released their first brand new properties in years, and I’d be curious to see what Rocksteady might do outside the confines of a familiar comic book property. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the original sci-fi, horror, western or whatever game these teams look like?
In a fair world, Suicide Squad would get away with better, less compromised terms, or at the very least, Rocksteady wouldn’t be stuck footing the bill for it. As it is, we can only hope that WB and its leadership will let the game studio figure out what it wants to do with what it does best and cook from there. Other studios have recovered from worse, but the ability to walk away from less-than-stellar titles isn’t something every developer can afford these days, and it would be a crappy full-circle moment for a team that’s built a lot of goodwill up until now.
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