Look, everyone is entitled to screw up; it’s part of what makes us human. The problem is when we’re forced to do something we don’t want to do, and then we suffer because of other people’s decisions. That’s been happening quite a bit lately in the gaming industry, as Rocksteady Studios can attest to. They were the people behind the brilliant Batman titles from years past and then were tasked with making Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League, which was released earlier this year after MANY delays. Needless to say, the game wasn’t that great, and sales were terrible. So, things are going to be changing for them going forward.
Thankfully, unlikely many stories of this nature, Rocksteady isn’t getting shut down, yet. Instead, in a new report from Bloomberg, the team is trying to pitch a brand-new single-player title that they can start working on. If this is true, then fans are going to be thrilled, as this is something that we players know they’re good at and can make something compelling with. Well, in potential, anyway. Let’s not forget that their third Batman game wasn’t the best, but it was still much better than Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League.
And that’s where the other part of this interesting report comes into play. You see, Bloomberg didn’t just look at what’s coming next from Rocksteady; they wondered how things got this bad. It turns out it really wasn’t their fault. You see, back in 2016, the film Suicide Squad came out during the era of the DCEU, and WB felt that it was the “perfect opportunity” to capitalize on the movie’s release. As it so happened, WB Games Montreal was starting out their own game featuring Task Force X, and Rocksteady was making a brand new IP.
Instead of allowing both to continue, Warner Bros scrapped both of them and tasked Rocksteady with the new game, thinking it’d be out by 2019 at the latest. Yeah, there’s a lot wrong with that line of thinking. Not the least of which is, as the report noted, the multiplayer gameplay aesthetic that WB wanted wasn’t something that Rocksteady was familiar with doing. As such, they kept having to delay the game and change the styles and mechanics to try and match what they felt would work, and the game came out a rather boring and tedious mess.
This should be a lesson to all companies that own game companies: don’t force them to do things that they don’t know how to do well!
