13 March 2023 , 16:04
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Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is just a couple of months away from launch, but reports say it could be arriving later than anticipated.
The last PlayStation State of Play event finished things off with an extended look at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, including new gameplay and battle pass confirmation but it was a rough showing compared to what many had expected. Considering that Rocksteady Studios hasn’t released a game since 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, many were hoping that the game would be a significant step up from the studios previous output.
Instead we were shown a fairly generic looking third-person shooter that looks more in line with Crackdown than the Arkham games. Not only that, but the game was revealed to be taking on the live service system with a required online connection, even in single-player and a battle pass.
According to a report from Jason Schreier on Bloomberg (via Eurogamer), the game could be pushed back to a date “later this year” after the showing at the PlayStation State of Play was negatively received. This has been independently verified by Windows Central, which adds a less vague release window of Q4 2023. Meanwhile, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb has said that he's heard the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League release date could be pushed back even further, right into 2024.
Schreier states that the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League release date has been pushed back “mainly for polish” rather than to overhaul the game entirely. However, if the reports about a possible delay to 2024 are true this may not be the case in the end.
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I’m purely speculating, but the reception to the gameplay reveal for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League must have shocked Warner Bros. and Rocksteady. It’s a well-regarded studio, making a game in the same universe as its critically acclaimed Arkham series and The Suicide Squad is more popular than ever thanks to the fantastic James Gunn movie. Everything was in place for this to be a hit.
But now it’s looking incredibly sub par, especially compared to the slew of other titles launching within weeks of the game's original May 26, 2023 release like Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy 16, and, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League seems to suffer from the same issue that plagues so many AAA games these days: feature creep. Because of the popularity of games like Fortnite and Destiny 2, it seems that now every game needs to be a live service affair with a battle pass. The industry is obsessed with keeping players in its ecosystem, rather than just creating a solid one-and-done experience like the previous Batman Arkham games. We saw this exact thing happen with Marvel's Avengers in 2020.
It’s hard not to be cynical about the game after such a poor showing, so hopefully this delay allows the team to go back to the drawing board and create something truly special like Arkham Asylum and Arkham City.