We have some interesting new insights into the behind the scenes issues of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League.
As reported by Jason Schreier for Bloomberg, there is no one single reason that led to the project failing. However, fans usually see the owners of game studios to blame for making decisions that harm the developers themselves.
For example, a lot of gamers are critical of studios like Rocksteady and Naughty Dog being ordered to make live service games. In the latter case, it did seem that Naughty Dog had enough pull to choose to bow out of The Last Of Us Online. In Rocksteady’s case, it certainly looked like they were only making Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League because they were being forced too.
But as it turns out, the truth was more complicated than that.
Rocksteady’s co-founders, Jamie Walker and Sefton Hill, really did not want to make another Batman Arkham game. Prior to Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, they were actually working on a multiplayer puzzle game codenamed Stones. That title wasn’t turning out well, and that’s when they shifted plans.
At the end of 2016, Walker and Hill sold their own employees on Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. They argued that it would be a better opportunity than starting a whole project from scratch, and that they could get it out by 2019 or 2020.
Understandably, Rocksteady struggled with the change in genres, and this could have been enough to make the project fail. But Walker and Hill were actively counterproductive to its success. Jason reported that staff would wait months before Hill would give feedback to their work. Rocksteady was also subject to abrupt shifts and new ideas that management proposed.
They wanted to give all four characters their own vehicles, but that was scrapped when there was so much work already put into their individual movement play patterns. Subsequently, Walker and Hill moved away from melee to making the game a shooter. As fans rightly pointed out, this didn’t make sense for Captain Boomerang, but obviously they got their way.
If this sounds a lot like what happened behind the scenes at Bungie, that is pretty much the same picture painted here. Sony was not intervening on Bungie’s best interests, and WB wasn’t properly checking what Rocksteady management was doing either. Jason reported that execs only gave enthusiastic praise for what they were shown, which of course suggests that they didn’t really understand how well the project was progressing.
Ironically, the worst thing in this situation with management was that Walker and Hill kept going with a strong belief that the project would come together at the last minute. For what it’s worth, that actually does happen with some games. For example, Rare was hampered by the worry that their Conker game would be seen as too similar to their Banjo Kazooie games. When they decided to shift Conker’s tone to be dark and more mature, it showed the world that the studio had more than one pony trick after all.
But in this case, Rocksteady’s employees referred to what Walker and Hill was doing as ‘toxic positivity.’
As we now know, Walker and Hill would actually leave Rocksteady, with Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League still unreleased. They have since founded a new studio, Hundred Star Games, and have reportedly signed a contract with Microsoft to publish their first title. With all this coming out into the open, however, one would rightly wonder if Microsoft was wise to make this contract.
