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

The Suicide Squad is lifeless, sort of. Lengthy reside the Suicide Squad… sort 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—workforce as much as take the Coluan down earlier than going off to set every thing proper, each of their universe and others the assorted Brainaics terrorized. It’s a considerably definitive finish that additionally feels prefer it got here immediately, particularly when you concentrate on how shortly Warner Bros. wished to wash its fingers of this challenge.

In any case, the query hovering round Suicide Squad is “what’s subsequent,” significantly for Rocksteady. The reply is easy, 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 growth on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Going by that logic, you’d suppose 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ease Rocksteady again into the single-player swing, however Return to Arkham exists, and Arkham Knight turns 10 years outdated this June.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 growth and recently cut staff, as did Rocksteady shortly after.) Final June, sources informed Bloomberg Rocksteady’s quick future helps put collectively a director’s reduce of 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy, then… we don’t know, but it surely’s presumably a single-player mulligan to get the studio again on observe.

On-line, the favored expectation and hope is one other Batman sport, ideally one which simply writes Suicide Squad off as non-canon or doesn’t tackle 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, varied (and later debunked) rumors claimed Rocksteady was making a Superman sport, and of this sport’s excessive factors, its recreation of Metropolis is taken into account fairly good. And if not the Man of Metal, actually every other hero who isn’t Marvel Girl would do at this level. By now, this workforce’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’d do Rocksteady some good to get out of the DC cage fully and make its personal factor. So far, its sole non-DC sport is its debut title, 2006’s City Chaos: Riot Response. One thing model new in all probability ought to’ve been the course to go after Knight, however that is pretty much as good a chance 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 workforce spend years and tens of millions of {dollars} making a single-player apology isn’t the very 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 of us have had about Insomniac turning 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 might make outdoors the confines of a well-known comedian e-book property. Wouldn’t or not it’s attention-grabbing to see what an unique sci-fi, horror, western, or no matter else sport seems to be like from this workforce?

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 needs to do with what it’s greatest at, and cook 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 as of late, and that will be a crappy full circle second for a workforce that’s constructed up quite a lot of goodwill so far.

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