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

The Suicide Squad is lifeless, type of. Lengthy dwell the Suicide Squad… type of.

Virtually a full yr 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—group as much as take the Coluan down earlier than going off to set every part proper, each of their universe and others the assorted Brainaics terrorized. It’s a considerably definitive finish that additionally feels prefer it got here all of a sudden, particularly when you consider how shortly Warner Bros. needed to scrub its arms of this undertaking.

In any case, the query hovering round Suicide Squad is “what’s subsequent,” notably for Rocksteady. The reply is straightforward, but additionally 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ease Rocksteady again into the single-player swing, however Return to Arkham exists, and Arkham Knight turns 10 years outdated this June.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 advised Bloomberg Rocksteady’s rapid future helps put collectively a director’s minimize of 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy, then… we don’t know, nevertheless 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 deal with 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 some other hero who isn’t Marvel Lady would do at this level. By now, this group’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. Thus far, 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 route to go after Knight, however that is pretty much as good a possibility as any to maneuver on. Returning to the Arkham properly as soon as extra would solely make issues ever weirder than it was once we discovered this was canon to these video games. Making the group spend years and hundreds of thousands of {dollars} making a single-player apology isn’t one of the best use of anybody’s time, and it’s not like we aren’t getting one other Bat-game ultimately. For all of the fears people have had about Insomniac turning into a Marvel video games machine, that’s very a lot occurred with Rocksteady, which is clearly stuffed with proficient individuals who ought to get the chance to unfold their wings. 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 e book property. Wouldn’t it’s attention-grabbing to see what an authentic sci-fi, horror, western, or no matter else recreation appears like from this group?

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 are able to solely hope WB and its management will simply let the sport studio determine what it needs to do with what it’s finest at, and prepare dinner from there. Different studios have recovered from worse, however the skill to stroll away from lower than stellar titles isn’t being afforded for each developer today, and that might be a crappy full circle second for a group that’s constructed up numerous goodwill thus far.

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