We Asked 100 People What They Thought About Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
Insider Gaming decided to ask 100 people who played the Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League closed alpha about the game.
insider-gaming.com
When asked what they’re rating of the alpha would be, 47.7% of people game it a rating of 7/10 or better. Overall, it seemed to get a lot of votes for a 6 and 7 out of 10, which would put it around the mixed/average rating if you were to use the Metacritic system.
When it comes to being a release day purchase, that’s where the numbers dip quite a bit. Of the 100 people we asked, 61% of them said that they wouldn’t be buying Suicide Squad on release. Most will either wait for a sale or just skip the game entirely.
We also asked players to leave their overall opinion on what they experienced in the closed alpha, knowing that changes to the game were still likely to come. Below are some of the responses.[/URL]
Also Jason Shreir chimes in (thnks John Elden) ...
Dead On Arrival
Last month in Los Angeles, video-game journalists got to play a few hours of the upcoming Suicide Squad game from Warner Bros. This week, they published previews, and the results weren’t pretty. “I left the preview event less optimistic than when I came in,” wrote IGN’s Destin Legarie. Eurogamer lamented that “this might not be the superhero fantasy you’re looking for.”Negativity has long surrounded Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which comes out on Feb. 2, in part because the franchise has underperformed but mostly because the game is illustrative of the type of trend-chasing that has led to a lot of heartbreak over the years.
Rocksteady Studios, the London-based developer behind the game, was once an industry darling thanks to the critically acclaimed Batman: Arkham series, which revolutionized superhero games with innovative gameplay and original stories rather than movie tie-ins. Then the company announced that it had pivoted from narrative, single-player action games to a third-person, multiplayer shooter, dismaying fans.
Even if the game turns out to be better than early previews suggest, it won’t be what many Arkham fans wanted from Rocksteady. Suicide Squad is an online live-service game, with cosmetic microtransactions and a stream of content that will continue after launch as Warner Bros. attempts to chase the Grand Theft Auto V and Fortnite dragons. These “games as a service,” which are monetized long after release, are so appealing to executives that Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. CEO David Zaslav recently said all of their big games would follow suit moving forward.
But the track record of companies that pivot to multiplayer is dismal. Recent live-service flops like Anthem, Redfall and Marvel’s Avengers all came from game studios that had previously been beloved for their single-player titles. Nobody wants Suicide Squad to suffer the same fate.
No wonder that this week following the previews, fans continued to repeat a rumor that won’t die — that the developers at Rocksteady had originally pitched a game about Superman, which was rejected by Warner Bros. and the company was instead forced to make this one.
In reality, Rocksteady never pitched or worked on a Superman game, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy over the last decade. Following the release of Arkham Knight in 2015, the studio began working on a Batman VR game and then an unannounced multiplayer game set in an original franchise, which has not been previously reported.
At the end of 2016, a Suicide Squad game at the Warner Bros. studio in Montreal was canceled, and the property was subsequently given to Rocksteady, which began working on the current iteration in 2017.
The Superman rumor appears to have originated from a user on X, formerly Twitter, named James Sigfield, who told me over direct messages that he had in fact been mistaken. “I corrected it in a later tweet, but it never caught on,” he said. “The person that gave me the info got the studios mixed up.”
Why, then, has such a flimsy rumor been so prevalent that fans continue to bring it up on social media today? Likely because nobody wants to believe the reality: that one of their favorite studios has been working on a multiplayer service game for more than half a decade.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League had several false starts and was delayed multiple times as the company tried to transition to an unfamiliar genre. By the time it comes out, it will have been in development for nearly seven years — about the same length of time that it took Rocksteady to release all three Arkham games.
The really bad news for Rocksteady is that the market is dangerously oversaturated. Even if the new Suicide Squad game overcomes low expectations and turns out to be a fantastic product, it’s hard to imagine a new multiplayer service game succeeding in an era when even stalwarts like Destiny can’t seem to grow.
This may not be a terrible outcome for fans, who hope that no matter how Suicide Squad performs, Rocksteady is permitted to get back to the type of games that made it an elite developer in the first place
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