Anyone who played Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could probably guess that something went terribly wrong during development. Bloomberg now reports that the multiplayer bomb from a studio beloved for its single-player Batman: Arkham games was plagued by several issues leading up to its repeatedly delayed launch.
According to Bloomberg, there wasn’t a single cause of Suicide Squad’s failure. Instead, the Rocksteady Studios project was hurt by an unclear and shifting creative vision, an ill-fated pivot to a completely new genre, and the “perfectionism” of former creative director Sefton Hill, who left the team prior to release to head up a brand new studio that’s reportedly working on a blockbuster for Microsoft.
Staff told Bloomberg that Hill often created a bottleneck during development, with people waiting a week or longer for him to sign off on individual elements of the open-world shooter. At one point he apparently had the idea to introduce an in-depth vehicle customization aspect to the game, balked at by others on the team since it would seemingly undermine Suicide Squad’s emphasis on its anti-heroes’ own individual traversal abilities. The game does still have (very bad) vehicle missions in it, which might be a remnant of that earlier vision.
What reality though? Companies are trying now more than ever to release the shittest cheapest games they can for massive gains. We see more and more trash making insane money. The reality is the average person will play a shitty game for something to do especially if it’s within their interests. In this case it just happened to fail so WB will fire a bunch of people and try something again. It’s a learning experience in the sense that they know they gotta raise the bar for the next release but it won’t be anything substantial.