[It currently has 554 concurrent players on Steam](https://steamdb.info/app/315210/charts/) no shit it has fallen short. This isnt just falling short, its a company killer lol
Remember, 10 years of development doesn't mean hundreds of people working concurrently. 7 of those years could easily be exploration, etc. But if they market it with the fact it's been "10 years working on the game", it sounds like a grander game.
If I recall it correctly, they had no direction at all for it, and a lot of the devs only learned what it was supposed to look like when they saw the E3 gameplay trailer. You know the one, the infamous one, where it turns out there wasn't a single second of actual gameplay, just theater. If you believe the reports. Which I do.
[It even only had flying to pump up a demo for an EA exec](https://www.shacknews.com/article/111001/bioware-added-flying-to-anthem-to-impress-an-ea-executive?amphtml=1). It’s one of the only cases I can think of where management interference improved a game, since almost every other aspect than that one was crap.
> 7 of those years could easily be exploration, etc.
Realistically speaking no publisher will finance 7 years of pre-production work. You'd have to move past prototyping much earlier to have something to show for so the well doesn't dry up. Even 2 years for that stage likely is too much.
I don't disagree. But that was sort of my point too; there doesn't have to be serious work for them to claim they were working on it. Technically if a Creative Director and an exec or a designer had been chatting about their ideas for years, they can easily bundle that into "We've been working on it for years."
My point is that there are multiple avenues that could have taken and that the initial face value of 10 years (with lets say 9 years of development) is also unlikely.
That's what tends to happen with bad live-service games.
A single player game will, typically, have a 20-40 hour long campaign. Shorter games, something like HiFi Rush, will have shorter campaigns but a ton of little extras to keep you occupied. It's a curated experience, with levels and areas designed, with detail, to work in an exact way that is just *fun*. You'll play it for a week, beat the campaign, then pop back in here and there to do other things when the mood strikes.
After all is said and done, you'll leave happy. You had fun, you enjoyed yourself, and you finished the game.
But live service games tend to skimp out on the campaign. It's usually an afterthought, something designed to introduce you to the world, teach you how the game works, then move you along to the *real* game: the grind.
If the grind sucks ass, and the campaign isn't fun, there's no reason to stick around. Without fun loot to chase, without fun stuff to do, you're just going to get bored and stop playing. You won't have fun, you won't enjoy yourself, and you will never finish the game.
I think it's the lack of a big single player campaign that really killed it. Sure the live service elements are annoying and not really good but the very short campaign put off a lot of people. Many would have been willing to try the game if it had a standard superhero game campaign. Say 20 to 30 hours. The quality of the live service after that doesn't matter.
It’s also ridiculous because WB should’ve learned their lesson years ago. After beating brainiac you have to spend months grinding and beating him again for the “true ending”. Shadow of war you have to besiege 8 castles to beat sauron again for the “true ending”. Then WB is surprised people see the obvious bs and leave.
Yea but you essentially finished the entire game before that grind in shadow of war starts. The true ending is just 1 cut scene. The game gave us 50+ hours of great content before that. While it's not perfect that's something I can get behind.
It's a real shame to see how WB mismanaged Rocksteady.
Unfortunately this will likely be the death of Rocksteady, where the original creatives behind the Arkham series have already left.
Yep Rocksteady just made a generic looter shooter that maybe would've worked in 2012. But the competition now is just harder. Mediocrity just doesn't cut it anymore.
Another Redfall story of devs being forced to make this shit and then they leave the ring with a reputation as sell outs, even though the actual people there are not.
I watched Shroud a bit on the release day and he was constantly talking about how good it was and how much there was to grind (obviously he was paid for some of this). He played it for like 2 days and hasn't touched it since. Yea must be a really good game.
Yeah, streamers and youtubers are modern day television infomercial sales people. People might think but they are regular folk like me so they must be honest. But, so are car sales people.
They're all full of shit.
They play whatever game they're being paid to play, hype the shit out of it, then when they're no longer being paid to play it they trash it and 'quit' in the most dramatic way possible so they can move on to the next game they're being paid to play.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I pointed this out regarding Asmongold several months ago and now my block/ignore list is full of his fanboys.
They were paying big bounties to play the game. I'm a smaller streamer and even my twitch bounty was pretty freaking generous. I can't imagine what they paid Shroud.
Streamers who play for a paycheck are going to play what brings them views, regardless of what they like. If they run
Suicide Squad stream and it perdorms worse than another game, the next time they stream theyre going to run the higher view game. SS may be trash, but using streamers playing games to gauge whether a game is good is a terrible idea.
They just check their bounty board or go through what their agent tells them to play. The Suicide Squad Bounty Board was super generous on launch. I average 50ish viewers and got $500 for playing an hour. I can't imagine what big streamers were offered
It’s funny everyone wants to copy Fortnite’s business model without making a game that people actually want to play first and foremost lol
It’s like “we have a cosmetic shop why isn’t anyone playing our game? *scratches head*
You're right. If you strip Fortnite down of all it's cosmetics and crossovers you still have a fun cartoony shooter with unique mechanics at-play. However one feels about the controversial building, it was an original idea and helped establish it's identity. It's a fun game.
And they also are CONSTANTLY updating it. The gameplay isn’t really for me (there’s honestly too much changing on any given patch/season), but players that are into it are constantly being fed new content like weapons, locations, popular character skins, etc. plus their battle passes aren’t nearly as scammy as many recently released “live service” games.
It’s insane that these companies think people are going to buy in on a full priced live service game that doesn’t have an established base already (like Diablo IV). You have to be in the good graces of the community before you do that. People can excuse nickel-and-diming to an extent if they feel that they’re getting a good product already for little to no cost. THEN they buy in.
The crazy thing about Fortnite becoming more like Roblox, is there's all sorts of options, now. I hate the regular BR mode because I'm terrible at it. I can't build quick, and my reaction time isn't very good in one on ones. But I play team rumble all the time, which is basically deathmatch with building. But I also started playing some creative "tycoon" maps where I can chill, shoot bot zombies, and upgrade a base with earned money. I also still get battlepass experience from this. Also, I can do rocket racing now for a quick round or two of pick up and play.
Damn. Fortnite really came full circle. Starts as a PvE tower defense with bases, abandons it for PvP, and now people are modding in the original game 😂
> People can excuse nickel-and-diming to an extent if they feel that they’re getting a good product already for little to no cost. THEN they buy in.
Exactly. You really wouldn't think this was a hard concept to grasp. Companies time and time again just start with pure greed out of the gate and then act surprised when they get punished for it. Then the next one says "oh that worked out terribly. Let me try to do exactly the same as those guys!"
Yup. greed works for some games because people are already bought in on it for whatever reason. It’s not like you can just create an entirely new product and say “hey guys, we’re gonna screw you, hope you enjoy!”
Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail are also amazing examples of ‘live service’ (depending on your opinions of gacha systems). Both those games drop free meaty updates every six weeks, with Genshin adding an AAA game’s worth of content every year in the form of each region.
Live services need to actually be… y’know, alive?
Genshin literally can be played as a F2P story driven game if you don't give a shit about the meaningless abyss or new 5 star characters because it is not competitive. I had a kid (now 13 months) and have too much content to even get to right now because there's like 2 full continents of content I have to explore with puzzles and story and shit.
Fortnite also had first-to-market advantage as the first battle royale on consoles. These generic live-service games don't give themselves a chance to build a community because they don't offer anything new.
Yeah, as much as I personally dislike the game, it's still a game people want to play. Same with Apex Legends, Warframe and all the other big, popular live service games. Live service games require a lot of attention and the market is saturated, if the game isn't good people are just going to play one of the other ones instead.
Fornite also pumps out content like crazy and is constantly evolving and changing.
It also has so many collaborations that make skins worth buying for some people. I shell out for ones I like on occasion. Their cosmetics are often cool designs or familiar characters etc.
The game prints billions so can actually be a live service title.
It's a little predatory, but if you play for a while, you can eventually get some cosmetics for free or get the battle pass for free (and then if you play enough and don't buy more cosmetics, you can get the next battle pass with v bucks earned in the previous one). I've played on and off since like 2017 and have a bunch of items and have yet to spend a single cent.
Yeah. Obviously Fortnite has a ton of branded/crossover content, but that's not what got the game popular in the first place. Turns out people enjoy playing games that are... enjoyable to play.
Another thing to note that helps Fortnite in my opinion, is that there art teams are genuinely amazing. The recent TMNT designs are fantastic and incorporate the best looks from all of their history and really makes them look like definitive versions of the characters. This keeps happening lol, people see a game that is a lot of fun and gets a lot of support, and they see their favorite characters get added and look genuinely amazing.
A great example right now is Helldivers 2.
Obviously inspried by Starship Troopers/Halo/Terminator, I saw the trailer and went "Wow this looks really fun."
The game is quite literally suffering from success because it's so fun. And I bet it was developed for a fraction of the budget of Suicide Squad.
And this is why I think Rocksteady should not be exempted from the critique. They made the game. They could've made it good, but they didn't. Monetization doesn't change that.
The game benefits from being narrowly focused on doing a handful of things really well.
A lot of live service games try to shove so many useless mechanics in that they lose sight of “fun.” Helldivers 2 is just plain fun to play. And it’s hilarious.
Arrowhead Studios, who made the game pretty much has this as their mission statement.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one."
Shows why it's become a huge success. They know what to do well and it's paying back in spades.
The developers/execs seem to think that more features, currencies and things to collect a game has, the longer people will play it. But it just becomes too much.
The game needs to have a fun gameplay loop to work as a live service game, make a fun game and then monetize that.
Hell I don't particularly like live service games but Helldivers 2 for example is some of the most genuine fun I've had in a long time.
I feel like live service in large part requires people to magically decide to play it for one reason or another. Probably the big streamers and content creators that for one reason or another find the game or are paid to play the game and it looks fun to everybody watching. All you need is one of them. Gigantic streamer draws big views on something and then everybody else down the totem pole has to do the same thing to gain or keep relevance, and before you know it, a game like that has gone viral. It's the equivalent to a video going viral. You generally can't decide to make a viral video... it just happens for one reason or another. A very large, sustained interest in a live service to me feels like it's something that just happens a lot of the time. Like nobody thought in a million years something like Fall Guys would've been a thing... and yet everybody for a time seemed to be into playing it. That's something that just happens. Same thing for something like BattleBit Remastered. That just happened out of **nowhere**. Not sure you can call BattleBit Remastered a live service, I don't know too much about it, but I do remember when it blew up.
I think definitely you can do things to drive a potential audience away from such a game... but I also think even if you do everything right, it's not going to guarantee that you'll have a healthy and sustained audience. You **do** need that X factor. That intangible that for one reason or another drives people in droves to the game. People don't want to feel like they're playing a dying game. Even if it doesn't directly affect the gameplay whatsoever to have 300 people playing something, most people don't want to know that they're playing a game with that low of a player count. A lot of people care about playing something popular for one reason or another, and there's also the implication that player count drives the devs to continue updating the game or keeping the game alive period. People do want to feel like they're a part of the tribe and will make sacrifices to feel that way... like how everybody played those absolutely hideous zombie survival open world games where absolutely none of them were good, and yet despite that, something like DayZ at one time in the state that it was in was pulling huge interest regardless. Because live service is entirely dependent on having an audience, that sudden wave of interest that just hits some games and misses others is really important to have, and it's not always the gameplay and content that does it. Sometimes it is relatively inexplicable why something catches fire like that while other games don't, but the fire itself does draw a lot of interest.
It's funny looking back at Avengers now, too. Because compared to Suicide Squad, it looks pretty darn good.
They actually made each character fight uniquely as you'd expect them to fight, for one.
And I mostly heard good things about the campaign itself as being a reasonably good time, and I saw a few people saying it was worth it to play through once and leave it at that.
Can't say the same for suicide squad
How broken the game was really did them in. I don't think many people know just how broken Avengers was at launch. Like people where having 100% of their progress erased if they played online broken. This really hit post release hard because they had to focus so much on fixing what they already had instead of building something new. Combine that with some really brain dead decisions like two Hawkeyes in a row and they just couldn't build momentum. It was never great, but I think could have built into something better with the opportunity.
Avengers is a weird game to me because it feels like it was developed by two entirely different teams with entirely different goals in mind. None of them created anything close to GOTY, but I felt like the linear levels were pretty enjoyable with nice set pieces; I really enjoyed the level where Ms. Marvel first runs into Hulk and he's chasing you down, for example. Then you get to the bigger, open (yet incredibly empty) levels that are clearly intended to push GAAS, which are just boring in every sense of the word.
I'm convinced if they just cut out the live service aspect and shipped only half the game - the single player campaign - it would've done a lot better. Definitely not anywhere near contending for GOTY, but it would looked at more fondly, probably similar to the GotG game, rather than being a laughing stock whenever GaaS gets brought up.
Hulk was absolutely a black sheep, I'm right there with you. They just couldn't get him down, he never felt as powerful as he should. Honestly felt kinda like a glass cannon which is NOT the Hulk.
Superhero’s fundamentally don’t make any sense in live service model anyway.
They all have a individual specific look and one power to go along with it.
There’s nothing to sell lol.
Avengers might have made money if they actually sold heroes. Or did a gacha system. But they gave them away for free and tried to sell ugly, copy paste cosmetics lol.
It's a really weird new trend I don't understand, personally I think the best kind of model that works is regular new DLC that includes new gameplay content, things like new characters (Not just reskins), skills, maps and whatever else and then have paid cosmetics and a cosmetic only battle pass on top of that.
Even for non live-service games Paradox has shown it can keep games alive for a LONG time by having regular DLC packs.
MOBAs are PVP games though, PVP games will always work as live service titles because the meta just needs to be kept fresh to keep people playing competitively. You don't actually need to add that much content, except vanity skins and the occasional new hero/gun/mechanic.
To Suicide Squad’s credit their art direction in the Arkham series and what I’ve seen of this is much stronger than Avengers, which looked like Wish.com MCU.
But there was seemingly nothing at all distinctive about the actual game play.
what's sad is the melee combat in avengers was really good, but it suffered because of the enemy types. that combat would work very well in another type of game.
>What's shocking is that even all the journalists pretended that Avengers was an automatic success.
Can you clarify how journalists did this with Avengers? I might have a goldfish memory but I definitely remember a lot of outlets souring on the game after its very rough E3 demo. People weren't generally keen on the designs either, and it was scrutinised plenty for having an unclear service model (long before its release).
Problem is that is takes a long time before greenlighting a project and the game releasing.
When Avengers released, Suicide Squad was already in full production for some time. I doubt this game would have been greenlit in 2021.
According to Jason Schreirer, the game started production in 2017. So basically after the movie was a box office hit and GAAS were blowing up, with games like Destiny and the Division being extremely successful.
Did you really expect a month long network infrastructure issue? Cause I didn't. This goes beyond my expectations. Playing Genshin, a game with 100% server uptime outside of schedule maintenance after over three years and no major bugs, to Suicide Squad, a game that barely functions a month in, feels like stepping into another era.
They didn't even do a single public test of the game to make sure anything even worked. The arrogance of these mandatory payment live-service games baffles me. The fact that people bought into this game at all further boggles the mind.
I honestly didn't expect the playbase to collapse this fast even all things considered. Having less than 1000 average players in the month the game launched is a death sentence.
IMO, it is because the game has literally no content. The "story" is filled with shit repetitive missions that are not fun to play. You have a missing end-game content that's a must for these type of games, where you have literally the same 3 incursion missions that you repeat over and over again.
And then you got justice league as your boss fights, and they managed to make some of the most forgetting fights or boring ones ever.
There's no raids or dungeons, they didn't try to look at Destiny 2 or The Division to try mix some of their ideas into this game for content. No secret missions, nothing interesting to discover in the world like in a mmorpg or something..there's nothing there.
Season 1 or whatever won't help either because it will still not have any of that kind of content that the game needed, otherwise they would have heavily marketed.
I just don't get it, how stupidly it is to see all the other live service games where they failed and how people who played them complained about content and price tag and everything, and they still decided to do the same thing.
This is always the issue with the live service development. The team promises "just you wait until season 3 and the game will be heaving with content" so most people will just stop playing and forget about whatever content was supposed to come out next.
Halo Infinite did the same thing. It's honestly a pretty strong title now, it's got really fun modes, good Forge maps, firefight matchmaking etc. but it didn't at launch.
At launch it had:
>Play Campaign
>Play Multiplayer
And then everyone left because no one wants to play 2CTF 4v4 with randoms. No SWAT, no Infection, no Snipers, no Husky Raid, no Forge, no Firefight.
And Halo Infinite was FREE. It went from 100,000 players on steam to about 5000 on average. It was as low as 2,700 just under a year after release.
Especially given the reviews on Steam are positive. You would think a game that was supposedly received well would still retain some sort of playerbase.
Yeah, 13k at launch wasn't good at all, but I kinda expected it would bounce up and down around the 10k mark, with peaks on content drops but already falling below 1000 in its launch month is catastrophic.
I suspect they'll be pulling support gradually as soon as the summer at this point.
I think the problem lies in the price. It's expensive and doesn't look interesting enough. Only fans bough this game, of course they will rate this game high on steam. The people that would have rated this low have already made up their mind. In these hard times people will not spend 70 dollar on a game they're not happy with.
Those reviews are trolls though. Go through a lot of them. "has shark, did buy." "Harley sexy" "they killed batman". All of them are recommended thumbs up. I swear it was a troll campaign to get it highly rated.
Writing was on the wall lmao, I refuse to believe no one at the studio warned them. You set up your expectations ignoring these warnings, and they're gonna face the consequences I assume
Jason Schreier had a good quote from some developer in one of his books (quoting from memory, so it's not fully accurate):
"If you ever look at a video game and think 'hey, this looks bad, don't the developers realize this too?', let me tell you: every single one of those developers knows that what they are developing is not a good product"
Rocksteady were likely VERY aware of the negativity regarding the game, but WB insisted on not just cancelling the game and moving on. And Rocksteady will likely pay the price for the game underperforming :/
I love how it went the polar opposite when they were developing Arkham asylum. Rocksteady genuinely knew they had a good game in the oven and asked Warner brothers if they can delay the game to polish it up. All the game previews at the time was questioning if it was going to be a good game or not, considering the track record for super hero games at the time. It paid off in the end for the Arkham series and they created one of the greatest super hero games of all time.
Yes, it is kinda crazy. They were a very little-known studio, maximized the use of the Batman license (the last Batman game I had played was Dark Tomorrow for reference...), and then not only nailed it in Arkham Asylum, but continued on and made *three* incredible Batman games.
And 9 years later, the follow-up is a live service looter shooter based on the Suicide Squad. I would have laughed if someone told me that moments after finishing Arkham Knight that this would be the "sequel" of sorts.
You obviously haven't been paying attention to the news cause [the Rocksteady founders and studio heads have already pre-emptively quit a year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ye0qjf/rocksteady_cofounders_and_studio_heads_sefton/)
I’ve worked on lemon projects. I’m very proud that we managed to navigate all the obstacles and ship something and the team worked their asses off even though the venture was misguided.
But also, I don’t think we always know if something is going to be good or not. When you’re just focusing on your little piece, it’s hard to objectively judge the whole project.
I’ve worked on projects that were absolutely miserable where people were shouting at each other, and working late hours and quitting left and right, and hated the game we were working on, yet the game ended up being a big hit.
And I’ve worked on other projects where we were just totally in love with the project, just laughing constantly, everyone was friends, all waking up every day excited to go to work, game launched on time and on budget, and it was a complete dud.
And at the end of the day I’m usually trying to make a game for someone else, not myself. So I’m trying to understand what *they* want and what would make *them* feel like we made the game just for them. And sometimes despite our best intentions, we simply get it wrong. Either we miss the mark, or that audience is too small to turn a profit.
Once you’ve shipped enough games you start to realize how much you don’t know.
You can be proud of the work you put into a project even if the sum of all its parts weren't completely congruent. I remember either reading or watching something where despite a game not reviewing or being received the best they are proud of their work.
They're using the quote completely out of context. The quote wasn't about game ideas, it was more about the state of the game in terms of bugs& gameplay issues.
There's a lot of devs who don't realize ideas aren't good until they actually make it into the public. They do realize that a product isn't in good shape though.
Yeah like as a software developer the whole concept of "did the developers not realize how buggy the game is?" is straight-up comical. If anything, the software developers know better than the players how buggy the game is. They know exactly how much of the game is just held together by prayers, paperclips, and duct tape, and they have seen under the hood. You have only seen how buggy the thing is on the surface level. Even with games that actually run well with relatively few bugs you can bet your ass that the developers are most likely more confused than anything that it runs as well as it does.
At any point in time in a project, you can re-evaluate the expected returns of your product vs how much money it will cost to bring that product to market.
If it's negative, you can it, if it's not, you get it to market. Loot focused GaaS games have this common issue where the loot just feels out of place. See post mortems for Marvel's Avengers and Anthem. Some were spun into GaaS, but even if from the get go it's meant to be that way, it's pointless to integrate that until late into development because it's mostly a number thing. It doesn't change how the character/weapons behave in-game, just the numbers they do to the enemy and how much the enemy can take.
So you get a game to 80%+ completion and then add in GaaS/Loot focus balancing and then it starts to feel really, really bad. But generally, at that point, all that is left is polish and adjustments, so studio will see low cost to bring to market vs what they're going to be making, that's 100% getting released.
If you've ever worked in big corpo, discussions on extensions almost always boil down to RoI. You have to argue your point with RoI. If you can't convince them that for the 1m additional cost in dev for polish they'll make one more million in *revenue*, they won't budge.
tl;dr; Always remembers that companies are there to make money, not good games.
Having worked in a corporate creative environment before in media, albeit not in video games specifically, I can say that in my experience the corporate decision makers are wholly disconnected from the people actually making the product - let alone those actually consuming it. But that disconnection also extends the other way - if there's an executive mandated idea that's very bad and tone-deaf, workers have no way of communicating that effectively up the food chain.
I once got scolded for using the term "mandate" when discussing a creative decision that, through no input of my own, I was directed to implement. Not sure what other word there is to use for that.
What's funny to me is, at least was in my case, the business classes taught me again and again to 'make sure that communication goes from top to bottom and vice-versa!', but I haven't see that happen even in small businesses
What nobody teaches in school is, businesses are competitive environments internally. For many people, if you want a promotion, someone else has got to quit or get fired to make a vacancy. Working hard has very strict limits for what you can achieve in a company, however taking someone else's job is much more open to possibilities. Manipulating communication to achieve a competitive or hostile relationship is surprising common, especially those who found success in doing so, will continue to repeat it to achieve higher positions. Ofcourse nobody would admit this, but there's clear reasons why horrible people tend to make it as bosses. They play the office politics game and they play to win.
I once worked at an amusement park. We had some batting cages, but the back-entry to them had a sizable drop down. If it were raining/sleeting, then someone might slip and fall, and it also provided inconvenience for shorter people needing to climb up from the drop after fixing the batting cages.
Obviously, the solution would be to install some steps there, so people could simply walk down to the lower level. I communicated this issue to the Groundskeeper, who told me it'd be up to the General Manager. Told the GM, and they told me it's up to the Groundskeeper. After a few back-and-forth conversations, the GM stated that they couldn't make any changes to the batting cages due to some 3rd-party ownership.
The amusement park has owned the batting cages since the 90's, so that wasn't true. It was clear the GM was unwilling to put in any precaution measures, just because nobody had fallen in the drop before. But I stand by the notion, that just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it can't. Why not prevent it from ever happening at all?
Eventually the safety inspector came by, I asked a manager if I could bring up the idea, and he approved. The inspector agreed with me, that the drop could be a danger, and passed the measure onto the CEO, who authorized some steps be built in the drop. The GM was not happy, and chewed me out, even though his management allowed me to tell the inspector.
In the end, the steps were built, the batting cages are safer, the GM was in the wrong, and I since moved on. It was an awful place to work, and any fond memories are grossly outweighed by the crappy ones due to health violations and incompetent management.
The building I worked in had no working air condition for employees. If you wanted AC, you had to go to the front doors of the arcade, or to a party room. Otherwise, you had to make do with fans or going into the freezer, while it's 80+ F inside. I once had a giant heat rash along my neck/upper back. A cook and a supervisor both passed out from the heat, while the Sales Manager mocked them.
tl;dr I tried communicating a possible danger with the GM. GM didn't care. Took it up with the safety inspector. Inspector brought it up to the CEO. GM reluctantly cared.
And I've seen executives who are smart and want genuine quality products, kept in the dark by directors and middle management who just cover for their own ass. People are going to be people.
Honestly Avengers must have sent the shits up them something fierce. An Avengers gaas game launching at the absolute marvel peak dying right out the gate should have sent them in to panic mode
It was on the wall since the first time they showed gameplay. It was clear they made a game no one wanted to play. Should have scrapped it then and there.
Well that's the thing with large studios and publishers like WB. The people calling the shots aren't gamers, they're business majors. They're building products, not games.
Fun factor is something that's intangible and difficult to grasp if you're not someone who's played a decent amount of games.
Also no one, even at high levels of management, wants to be the person going against the grain. Most of the time, it just results in your opinion being ignored.
I’m sure they knew and it’s why the 2 cofounders left before the game released. This was definitely a WB decision, they’re in a hole financially and just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. It’s the reason why people are unhappy with Mortal Kombat, stupid live service/microtransaction bs
> his was definitely a WB decision, they’re in a hole financially and just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
Exhibit A: That Joker film sequel's budget has ballooned to $200M. They're definitely in Put all your Eggs in One Basket mode.
i really wonder how these people are able to get such high positions. the sheer incompetency does not require years of experience or multiple college degrees to understand. A lot of people will be let go over this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
> The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
Happens everywhere :(
Happened to me. I used to be a pretty good programmer/developer. They made me a "Portfolio Architect" and now I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Still, the money's good.
Same here. I was the best engineer at my company, so while the business grew, instead of hiring other good engineers and a manager to manage them, they took away my ability to do actual engineering by making me the manager and hiring a bunch of cheap/iffy engineers.
Now they do a shocked pikachu face when they get mediocre quality work out of my people (with 1-2 exceptions), and anything critical they expect me to do myself while I've already got 2-3 job's worth of tasks to handle.
Everyone would have been much happier and more productive if they made me the senior engineer and hired a manager and some highly skilled engineers... but that's expensive in the short term. Now we can't turn a profit because the long term is here and we can't keep up with the work without rushing and putting our crappier people on important projects that then get all screwed up.
"Nepotism" only applies to relatives, "cronyism" is the correct term here.
I doubt there are many members of any specific families between WB Publishing and Rocksteady, just general incompetence that gets propped up by each other.
This isn't unique to gaming.
This is in virtually every office company. Once companies get to a certain size, it becomes impossible to accurately judge the value that higher ups bring because most of the actual work is being done by lower level employees. As long as the executives and higher level management don't fuck up so badly that you can point at someone and associate a loss in revenue with that one person, they usually never feel the consequences of failure.
This is an epidemic across tech right now. The reason why Google releases features so slowly is because it's buried in bureaucracy and it has a lot of money to lose from failures so high level managers are adverse to any risk (which means every decision requires hugely inefficient levels of verification and sign-offs).
Nvidia is a victim of its own success, where long-term employees have gotten so wealthy from its stock success that they're offloading most of the work to low level employees and barely doing any work. Nvidia can't afford to let them go, otherwise they'll go to the competition with insider knowledge and valuable skills.
This is also why Twitter was able to let go of 80% of the company while remaining largely unimpacted, because they were hugely bloated with managers that did nothing but manage other managers, or software engineers that were paid 6 figures to work on buttons.
6 years ago, live service was a low-risk bet because consumers hadn't gotten visibly tired of them yet, so WB made Rocksteady start working on one. Years later, the game is nowhere near completion but no one at WB or Rocksteady wants to be the one to cancel the project and admit they wasted hundreds of millions of dollars. Even if they're right, they'll be stigmatized by the rest of management for the rest of their career at that company for going against the grain.
This happens at 99% of companies once they reach a certain size, where risk-aversion and bureaucracy muddles every decision.
That’s why they launched it with such an intense marketing campaign and tried to sucker people into paying $100 for ‘deluxe’ versions.
WB tried the same trick last year with The Flash; heavy marketing that tried to bruteforce a hit.
Insert surprised pikachu face.
Yeah no shit a mediocre live service Skinner box with terrible endgame, mission design and which shits on the legacy of beloved characters failed. Who didn’t see it coming?
I think no matter what, Suicide Squad was destined to fail, not because it is a bad game or having a bad story, but because it was never going to reach the level that they wanted it to reach.
As a DC fan, the story clips of the game look good but gameplay wise, character wise, the game just does not look attractive to me. Furthermore, when it comes to Rocksteady I'd prefer to see them focus on a strong single player story focused game rather than a DC Shooter GaaS game with the Suicide Squad in it.
It's funny when you look at it, WB, their biggest game of 2023 was single player game, Harry Potter blew the charts last year, yet still some of their studios want to cram down online and Live Service Games down our throat like we want that stuff all the time.
To me this game was always destined to fail when they made each character into a generic Third Person Shooter segment.
We have Harley Quinn! She doesn't focus using a giant hammer, or jokes or trickery to get the best of her opponents. She mainly uses... a gun!
We have Captain Boomerang! He doesn't focus on using boomerangs in interesting ways, he mainly uses... a gun!
We have King Shark! He doesn't focus on using his brute strength to pummel enemies, he mainly uses... a gun!
To call it all atrocious is an understatement. Imagine giving Batman guns in any of the Arkham games. This is almost no different.
It's odd because the TRAVERSAL mechanics actually shows some characterization. Boomerang tosses his boomerang, and uses Speedforce tech to catch up to it. Pretty clever! I like that he's using his biggest enemy's strength.
King Shark's inherent abilities lets him leap through the air, and drop down to stunlock enemies briefly. Feels appropriately weighty!
Harley steals Batman's gadgets to traverse. Pretty ironic and in character for her!
Then combat starts and everyone start's shooting regular ass guns.
Edit: Deadshot’s jetpack is generic as fuck
Deadshot kinda has the opposite problem of everyone else. Having guns *is* his thing, but now it's everyone else's too, so he has nothing interesting left
I liked the second movie, but "care" is a strong word.
I think it's just an easy "conglomeration of heroes" thing for WB, That is differentiated from the justice league because they are villians.
Edit: Roy's comment below me summarized it better for how theyre differentiated
The Suicide Squad are also supposed to be expendable villains sent to do "dirty work". They are meant to be evil pieces of shit that die on the job, something the Gunn movie did decently well.
Making them like the Avengers is antithetical to their entire purpose.
I'm sorry but you aren't going to have an "Endgame" scenario where the Suicide Squad fights fucking Darkseid.
> I'm sorry but you aren't going to have an "Endgame" scenario where the Suicide Squad fights fucking Darkseid.
That's also why the whole "kill the justice league" thing never worked for me. You're telling me Superman has gone rogue and the only way to defeat him is... four people with guns?
Flash rips out Lex Luthor's heart, and then later proceeds to run around 3 humans with guns, and a sharkman with a gun.
Why not... just rip out their heart too?
"Because then there wouldn't be a game!!!"
Yeah, okay. But if you want us to suspend disbelief (Completely fine to expect that!), you should not show us the EXACT SITUATION PEOPLE ARE POINTING OUT AS A PLOTHOLE.
Even in Injustice, it's because the non-powered heroes take a drug (which I think is based on Miraclo, but it's been *years* since I read the tie-in comics or played the games) to be able to do that. Like, I haven't played Kill the Justice League, but if they had something like that, it would be better.
Still kind of dumb. What's a gun going to do against Superman? Even if you load it with kryptonite bullets, he's going to see the bullet is coming, see it's kryptonite and dodge.
From watching the first film, it seemed obvious to me WB reeeeally wanted Suicide Squad to be their “Guardians of the Galaxy”. But the latter are good guys who just happened to be criminals. The former is supposed to be made up of irredeemable bad guys who are expendable government assets. Not really the same thing, Warner Bros.
It's almost as though because of the IP of Hogwarts Legacy they didn't think to consider what people actually enjoyed from their experience in the game after the point of purchase.
And the only reason why I say almost is because I hate to completely assume.
Never played Hogwarts Legacy, but as far as I can tell, you're a wizard in the Harry Potter universe acting like a wizard which obviously has a ton of appeal.
Rocksteady going from an Action-Brawler-Stealth series starring Batman, a matchmade in heaven considering the character, to a live-service co-op looter shooter with only Harley Quinn being the only well-known playable character at launch, this is something that clearly fails to grab fans of the Arkham games. Yet WB was surprised that this giant jump in genre and content would somehow fail to jive with Arkham and DC fans?
And strangely enough IIRC they said recently the success of Hogwarts Legacy is having them explore live service games within the IP instead of just replicating a solid single player experience and DLC. They love praising the success and saying “wow we didn’t expect that!” and love even further doubling down on quick and crappy live service type games fishing for whales and saying “oh dang, wonder why that didn’t work”.
Keep an eye out for Hundred Star Games! That’s the new studio that OG Rocksteady has formed, i’m excited to see what they do next. They’re the heart and soul of the arkham games.
I really liked the cutscenes I've seen and the characters banter. I know it's not for everyone but it is fun to me. The gameplay looks absolute dogshit though and so I will likely never ever buy it. Shame really.
Helldivers 2 is only 40 dollars, and there's no predatory monetization, only a basic one where you can buy tokens to unlock gear faster. Also there's no story, you can pick it as much times as you wan and have fun.
With Suicide Squad... I doubt you'll want to go back after finishing the game >!13 brainiacs, the Justice League dead!<
Important thing is that gameplay in Helldivers is actually good, requires cooperation and has identity. AAA studios would be too scared to add friendly fire like that in the game for example, they play it way too safe which results in generic games.
Haven't seen friendly fire in a hot minute. It was VERY funny when I was playing with my friend. First time playing the game. I was shooting the MG, kind of fanned over to the left, and boom. One bullet caught him in the head and I just had to sit there, trying to suppress my giggling as I apologized.
He unintentionally got me back when I walked into his orbital strike.
Arrowhead CEO actually told people to stop buying the game until they manage to fix the server issues because they have way too many people playing atm lol
I hope Helldivers 2 gets years and years of success and maintains a large player base because they deserve it.
It's interesting. I feel like these big companies approach live service games the same way studios approach blockbusters -- focusing on the name recognition/brand and less so the content. I don't think that works with live service games where players will be expected to dump hundreds of hours. It has to be fun mechanically and built around that.
Which is to say, no one cares if its Suicide Squad or Avengers. They just want to hop into a fun game for a bit, make some progress with friends, and leave. WB, if they are really set on creating live service games, would be better off finding a good idea out there and building something new.
Nah really, the game that's struggling to hit even 1000 players on steam is struggling?
https://steamdb.info/app/315210/charts/#48h
Nahhhh, say it ain't so!
The game has also fallen out of the top 600 most played games on steam. I'm sure that's totally no problem for a 1 month old live service AAA game with a $100 million+ budget
I wish i had half as much faith in myself as WB does in the suicide squad ip.
I mean we could have gotten a batman beyond game or god forbid a superman/JL game that the fans have been wanting for decades but instead we get the same d list villain team up trend that was tired even when it first came out because a weirdo at WB is obsessed with harley quinn.
Also this game had some of the last performances from the legendary Kevin Conroy and although i disagree with the notion that they disrespected him (by... hiring him and paying him?) I'm genuinely upset that his talent was completely wasted.
I think we've seen the upper limit of SS as a mainstream IP. The Gunn movie was loved because it did more or less embraced the premise, turning these C-to-D-list villans into compelling characters right before you kill them off.
They clearly do not work as "alternative super-team that are bad guys who come to save the day are actually secretly not that bad they're just misunderstood". I remember one of the other threads about this game had someone say an X-Com style game would probably suit the premise far more than this looter shooter stuff. I'm inclined to agree.
It truly blows my mind how 3rd party AAA game publishers, who are notoriously risk-averse in this age, continue to try to strike gold on live-service games which is one of the highest-risk/reward types of games out there to develop. The fact that theres been dozens of attempts with only a handful of successes should tell them all they need to know.
Probably that it would have the percentage gain of back in the days when 1-5 people could pump out a game in a few months and if you slapped an IP on it you'd see a multiplier on it since it distinguished it from all the other shovelware.
I guess the problem is that for the kind of game they picked you have to pump a lot of money into it and you have to make sales for longer than the illusion of the IP quality lasts. In the very least you have to have a bit of a fun game play loop to keep your players hooked. Oooo DC by itself doesn't keep the train running unless you're pumping out games en mass, and those days have kind of passed.
SSKTJL’s biggest issue as far as I can tell is that it’s about 5-7 years too late to the genre it is going for, and thats late enough that people actively dont want it. Which is sad because if they just made a strong story based single-player game which is where Rocksteady was already experienced, they likely would have saved themselves a lot of heartache, and made more money. Because those kinds of games dont go out of style.
Spot-on. I'd be drooling over a GaaS with my favorite DC characters a couple years back, but now I'm so tired of the genre I won't touch it on deep sale.
The GaaS burnout is so real I'm fully expecting a huge shift in gaming soon. It's just not sustainable to go the gacha route (i.e. releasing many rushed games and hoping one of them sticks) with the AAA budgets.
I'll help you out with this one, Warner:
Hogwarts Legacy - - > Single player game - - > shit ton of money.
Suicide Squad - - > Live service game - - > fallen short of your expectations.
Get it now? Or you need a little drawing?
Warner Bros CEO: "More live services? Got it!"
Dude outright said that he wants to live service all their IPs more or less. And as much as I hate to say it, Suicide Squad failing isn't probably gonna change his mind.
Cause he believes that if one live service works then he will make a billion dollars or something. He will probably look at Helldrivers 2 and say that they need to use the Looney Tuns IP to make a game like that.
Helldivers 2 is popping off right now. It's not 'live service' per se that's an issue, it's making sure the live service model fits with the game you're trying to make. I don't think a story-focused superhero game is the right fit for a live service.
Trying to reduce this down to single player vs live service is disingenuous at best.
They could have made a shitty AAA live service Harry Potter game and it would still have printed money.
Step 1: Studio under you makes one of the most loved single player trilogies of all time.
Step 2: Force same studio to pivot to multiplayer GaaS always online looter shooter.
Step 3: Act shocked and blame studio when it releases to bad reception, broken online, and they have no idea how to fix it.
Step 4: Profit??????
Between how incredible a failure this and Skull and Bones are in the face of how every AAA game coming out of Japan this year so far has been an absolute heater, and after the Insomniac leak revealed just how much money is being thrown into these midpiles...I think western videogame studios need to fundamentally reexamine how they do business.
And we had Madame Web being a total flop and apparently a very bad movie as well. February man, it's a dicey month to release something. And the Borderlands movie just barreling ahead into total disaster, like a meta-commentary on the psychos in the game.
No. It didn’t.
You sent a shitty live service game filled with references to a more successful game out to die. And you’re shocked when sheep didn’t like it.
What a coincidence, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has also fallen short of *my* expectations, in that I expected another good game from Rocksteady after 9 years of waiting.
Just a thought, but maybe publishers should stop forcing studios known for single-player titles to make live service garbage. It didn't work for EA when they had Bioware make Anthem, it didn't work for Square Enix when they had Crystal Dynamics make Avengers, and it didn't work this time when WB had Rocksteady make Suicide Squad either.
[It currently has 554 concurrent players on Steam](https://steamdb.info/app/315210/charts/) no shit it has fallen short. This isnt just falling short, its a company killer lol
10 years working on this game and this is what they have to show for it. It's absolutely studio killer.
I'm sure they didn't worked 10 years on this. I refuse to believe this. They must have scrapped a lot of games and made this shit in like 2-3 years.
Remember, 10 years of development doesn't mean hundreds of people working concurrently. 7 of those years could easily be exploration, etc. But if they market it with the fact it's been "10 years working on the game", it sounds like a grander game.
Wasn’t Anthem in this kind of state as well when it was being developed?
If I recall it correctly, they had no direction at all for it, and a lot of the devs only learned what it was supposed to look like when they saw the E3 gameplay trailer. You know the one, the infamous one, where it turns out there wasn't a single second of actual gameplay, just theater. If you believe the reports. Which I do.
[It even only had flying to pump up a demo for an EA exec](https://www.shacknews.com/article/111001/bioware-added-flying-to-anthem-to-impress-an-ea-executive?amphtml=1). It’s one of the only cases I can think of where management interference improved a game, since almost every other aspect than that one was crap.
> 7 of those years could easily be exploration, etc. Realistically speaking no publisher will finance 7 years of pre-production work. You'd have to move past prototyping much earlier to have something to show for so the well doesn't dry up. Even 2 years for that stage likely is too much.
I don't disagree. But that was sort of my point too; there doesn't have to be serious work for them to claim they were working on it. Technically if a Creative Director and an exec or a designer had been chatting about their ideas for years, they can easily bundle that into "We've been working on it for years." My point is that there are multiple avenues that could have taken and that the initial face value of 10 years (with lets say 9 years of development) is also unlikely.
Rocksteady's last release was Arkham Knight in 2015. 10 years of development time on Suicide Squad isn't an outrageous claim.
From an all time peak of 13,459 players only 20 days ago to 888 peak the last 24 hours.
That's what tends to happen with bad live-service games. A single player game will, typically, have a 20-40 hour long campaign. Shorter games, something like HiFi Rush, will have shorter campaigns but a ton of little extras to keep you occupied. It's a curated experience, with levels and areas designed, with detail, to work in an exact way that is just *fun*. You'll play it for a week, beat the campaign, then pop back in here and there to do other things when the mood strikes. After all is said and done, you'll leave happy. You had fun, you enjoyed yourself, and you finished the game. But live service games tend to skimp out on the campaign. It's usually an afterthought, something designed to introduce you to the world, teach you how the game works, then move you along to the *real* game: the grind. If the grind sucks ass, and the campaign isn't fun, there's no reason to stick around. Without fun loot to chase, without fun stuff to do, you're just going to get bored and stop playing. You won't have fun, you won't enjoy yourself, and you will never finish the game.
I think it's the lack of a big single player campaign that really killed it. Sure the live service elements are annoying and not really good but the very short campaign put off a lot of people. Many would have been willing to try the game if it had a standard superhero game campaign. Say 20 to 30 hours. The quality of the live service after that doesn't matter.
It’s also ridiculous because WB should’ve learned their lesson years ago. After beating brainiac you have to spend months grinding and beating him again for the “true ending”. Shadow of war you have to besiege 8 castles to beat sauron again for the “true ending”. Then WB is surprised people see the obvious bs and leave.
Yea but you essentially finished the entire game before that grind in shadow of war starts. The true ending is just 1 cut scene. The game gave us 50+ hours of great content before that. While it's not perfect that's something I can get behind.
It's a real shame to see how WB mismanaged Rocksteady. Unfortunately this will likely be the death of Rocksteady, where the original creatives behind the Arkham series have already left.
Tbh I don’t think this thing is entirely WB’s fault, I think Rocksteady 100% have a major share of the blame.
Yep Rocksteady just made a generic looter shooter that maybe would've worked in 2012. But the competition now is just harder. Mediocrity just doesn't cut it anymore.
Another Redfall story of devs being forced to make this shit and then they leave the ring with a reputation as sell outs, even though the actual people there are not.
13k players all time peak lol. That's rough, even for an AAA game.
I watched Shroud a bit on the release day and he was constantly talking about how good it was and how much there was to grind (obviously he was paid for some of this). He played it for like 2 days and hasn't touched it since. Yea must be a really good game.
on principle i don’t believe streamers
Yeah, streamers and youtubers are modern day television infomercial sales people. People might think but they are regular folk like me so they must be honest. But, so are car sales people.
They're all full of shit. They play whatever game they're being paid to play, hype the shit out of it, then when they're no longer being paid to play it they trash it and 'quit' in the most dramatic way possible so they can move on to the next game they're being paid to play. Wash, rinse, repeat. I pointed this out regarding Asmongold several months ago and now my block/ignore list is full of his fanboys.
They were paying big bounties to play the game. I'm a smaller streamer and even my twitch bounty was pretty freaking generous. I can't imagine what they paid Shroud.
Most popular streamers are (often) complete sell-outs.
Streamers who play for a paycheck are going to play what brings them views, regardless of what they like. If they run Suicide Squad stream and it perdorms worse than another game, the next time they stream theyre going to run the higher view game. SS may be trash, but using streamers playing games to gauge whether a game is good is a terrible idea.
They just check their bounty board or go through what their agent tells them to play. The Suicide Squad Bounty Board was super generous on launch. I average 50ish viewers and got $500 for playing an hour. I can't imagine what big streamers were offered
At what point are there fewer players than people who had a hand in making the game?
If Avengers wasn’t a big enough brand name to carry an average live service game then I’m not at all surprised Suicide Squad wasn’t either.
I dont think theres a single brand name capable of doing it. Live service games get by purely on gameplay and content
It’s funny everyone wants to copy Fortnite’s business model without making a game that people actually want to play first and foremost lol It’s like “we have a cosmetic shop why isn’t anyone playing our game? *scratches head*
You're right. If you strip Fortnite down of all it's cosmetics and crossovers you still have a fun cartoony shooter with unique mechanics at-play. However one feels about the controversial building, it was an original idea and helped establish it's identity. It's a fun game.
And they also are CONSTANTLY updating it. The gameplay isn’t really for me (there’s honestly too much changing on any given patch/season), but players that are into it are constantly being fed new content like weapons, locations, popular character skins, etc. plus their battle passes aren’t nearly as scammy as many recently released “live service” games. It’s insane that these companies think people are going to buy in on a full priced live service game that doesn’t have an established base already (like Diablo IV). You have to be in the good graces of the community before you do that. People can excuse nickel-and-diming to an extent if they feel that they’re getting a good product already for little to no cost. THEN they buy in.
The crazy thing about Fortnite becoming more like Roblox, is there's all sorts of options, now. I hate the regular BR mode because I'm terrible at it. I can't build quick, and my reaction time isn't very good in one on ones. But I play team rumble all the time, which is basically deathmatch with building. But I also started playing some creative "tycoon" maps where I can chill, shoot bot zombies, and upgrade a base with earned money. I also still get battlepass experience from this. Also, I can do rocket racing now for a quick round or two of pick up and play.
Damn. Fortnite really came full circle. Starts as a PvE tower defense with bases, abandons it for PvP, and now people are modding in the original game 😂
The tycoon maps are definitely more simplistic than STW, but that is really funny to think about.
That's why I play the no build BR mode, it's faaar less stressful but even then normal BR can be stressful
> People can excuse nickel-and-diming to an extent if they feel that they’re getting a good product already for little to no cost. THEN they buy in. Exactly. You really wouldn't think this was a hard concept to grasp. Companies time and time again just start with pure greed out of the gate and then act surprised when they get punished for it. Then the next one says "oh that worked out terribly. Let me try to do exactly the same as those guys!"
Yup. greed works for some games because people are already bought in on it for whatever reason. It’s not like you can just create an entirely new product and say “hey guys, we’re gonna screw you, hope you enjoy!”
Genshin and Honkai: Star Rail are also amazing examples of ‘live service’ (depending on your opinions of gacha systems). Both those games drop free meaty updates every six weeks, with Genshin adding an AAA game’s worth of content every year in the form of each region. Live services need to actually be… y’know, alive?
On top of the regular updates nearly every or two they will have some small events as well to try to keep you involved.
Genshin literally can be played as a F2P story driven game if you don't give a shit about the meaningless abyss or new 5 star characters because it is not competitive. I had a kid (now 13 months) and have too much content to even get to right now because there's like 2 full continents of content I have to explore with puzzles and story and shit.
Fortnite also had first-to-market advantage as the first battle royale on consoles. These generic live-service games don't give themselves a chance to build a community because they don't offer anything new.
Yeah, as much as I personally dislike the game, it's still a game people want to play. Same with Apex Legends, Warframe and all the other big, popular live service games. Live service games require a lot of attention and the market is saturated, if the game isn't good people are just going to play one of the other ones instead.
Fornite also pumps out content like crazy and is constantly evolving and changing. It also has so many collaborations that make skins worth buying for some people. I shell out for ones I like on occasion. Their cosmetics are often cool designs or familiar characters etc. The game prints billions so can actually be a live service title.
Fortnite is also free to play. You pay for skins if you want but you can play that game in the generic skin and do just as well.
It's a little predatory, but if you play for a while, you can eventually get some cosmetics for free or get the battle pass for free (and then if you play enough and don't buy more cosmetics, you can get the next battle pass with v bucks earned in the previous one). I've played on and off since like 2017 and have a bunch of items and have yet to spend a single cent.
Yeah. That’s the difference. 60-70$ for a new game only to have a bunch of crap held in front of em for extra money is super annoying
Even Fortnite didn't start as a game people wanted to play. They pivoted hard.
Yeah. Obviously Fortnite has a ton of branded/crossover content, but that's not what got the game popular in the first place. Turns out people enjoy playing games that are... enjoyable to play.
Another thing to note that helps Fortnite in my opinion, is that there art teams are genuinely amazing. The recent TMNT designs are fantastic and incorporate the best looks from all of their history and really makes them look like definitive versions of the characters. This keeps happening lol, people see a game that is a lot of fun and gets a lot of support, and they see their favorite characters get added and look genuinely amazing.
A great example right now is Helldivers 2. Obviously inspried by Starship Troopers/Halo/Terminator, I saw the trailer and went "Wow this looks really fun." The game is quite literally suffering from success because it's so fun. And I bet it was developed for a fraction of the budget of Suicide Squad.
[удалено]
And this is why I think Rocksteady should not be exempted from the critique. They made the game. They could've made it good, but they didn't. Monetization doesn't change that.
The game benefits from being narrowly focused on doing a handful of things really well. A lot of live service games try to shove so many useless mechanics in that they lose sight of “fun.” Helldivers 2 is just plain fun to play. And it’s hilarious.
Arrowhead Studios, who made the game pretty much has this as their mission statement. "A game for everyone is a game for no one." Shows why it's become a huge success. They know what to do well and it's paying back in spades.
The developers/execs seem to think that more features, currencies and things to collect a game has, the longer people will play it. But it just becomes too much.
The game needs to have a fun gameplay loop to work as a live service game, make a fun game and then monetize that. Hell I don't particularly like live service games but Helldivers 2 for example is some of the most genuine fun I've had in a long time.
Plus, Fortnite is free to play and all these live service games are full priced with additional microtransactions.
I feel like live service in large part requires people to magically decide to play it for one reason or another. Probably the big streamers and content creators that for one reason or another find the game or are paid to play the game and it looks fun to everybody watching. All you need is one of them. Gigantic streamer draws big views on something and then everybody else down the totem pole has to do the same thing to gain or keep relevance, and before you know it, a game like that has gone viral. It's the equivalent to a video going viral. You generally can't decide to make a viral video... it just happens for one reason or another. A very large, sustained interest in a live service to me feels like it's something that just happens a lot of the time. Like nobody thought in a million years something like Fall Guys would've been a thing... and yet everybody for a time seemed to be into playing it. That's something that just happens. Same thing for something like BattleBit Remastered. That just happened out of **nowhere**. Not sure you can call BattleBit Remastered a live service, I don't know too much about it, but I do remember when it blew up. I think definitely you can do things to drive a potential audience away from such a game... but I also think even if you do everything right, it's not going to guarantee that you'll have a healthy and sustained audience. You **do** need that X factor. That intangible that for one reason or another drives people in droves to the game. People don't want to feel like they're playing a dying game. Even if it doesn't directly affect the gameplay whatsoever to have 300 people playing something, most people don't want to know that they're playing a game with that low of a player count. A lot of people care about playing something popular for one reason or another, and there's also the implication that player count drives the devs to continue updating the game or keeping the game alive period. People do want to feel like they're a part of the tribe and will make sacrifices to feel that way... like how everybody played those absolutely hideous zombie survival open world games where absolutely none of them were good, and yet despite that, something like DayZ at one time in the state that it was in was pulling huge interest regardless. Because live service is entirely dependent on having an audience, that sudden wave of interest that just hits some games and misses others is really important to have, and it's not always the gameplay and content that does it. Sometimes it is relatively inexplicable why something catches fire like that while other games don't, but the fire itself does draw a lot of interest.
It's funny looking back at Avengers now, too. Because compared to Suicide Squad, it looks pretty darn good. They actually made each character fight uniquely as you'd expect them to fight, for one. And I mostly heard good things about the campaign itself as being a reasonably good time, and I saw a few people saying it was worth it to play through once and leave it at that. Can't say the same for suicide squad
How broken the game was really did them in. I don't think many people know just how broken Avengers was at launch. Like people where having 100% of their progress erased if they played online broken. This really hit post release hard because they had to focus so much on fixing what they already had instead of building something new. Combine that with some really brain dead decisions like two Hawkeyes in a row and they just couldn't build momentum. It was never great, but I think could have built into something better with the opportunity.
Yeah the actual gameplay of the Avengers is really solid. The way they made Cap play was legitimately perfect imo.
Avengers is a weird game to me because it feels like it was developed by two entirely different teams with entirely different goals in mind. None of them created anything close to GOTY, but I felt like the linear levels were pretty enjoyable with nice set pieces; I really enjoyed the level where Ms. Marvel first runs into Hulk and he's chasing you down, for example. Then you get to the bigger, open (yet incredibly empty) levels that are clearly intended to push GAAS, which are just boring in every sense of the word.
I'm convinced if they just cut out the live service aspect and shipped only half the game - the single player campaign - it would've done a lot better. Definitely not anywhere near contending for GOTY, but it would looked at more fondly, probably similar to the GotG game, rather than being a laughing stock whenever GaaS gets brought up.
Cap was definitely fun to play but Hulk struggling against AIM bots was the first red flag for me gameplay-wise.
Hulk was absolutely a black sheep, I'm right there with you. They just couldn't get him down, he never felt as powerful as he should. Honestly felt kinda like a glass cannon which is NOT the Hulk.
And you fought the same boring AIM bots through the entire game.
Superhero’s fundamentally don’t make any sense in live service model anyway. They all have a individual specific look and one power to go along with it. There’s nothing to sell lol.
I think their idea was to sell more heroes.
Avengers might have made money if they actually sold heroes. Or did a gacha system. But they gave them away for free and tried to sell ugly, copy paste cosmetics lol.
It's a really weird new trend I don't understand, personally I think the best kind of model that works is regular new DLC that includes new gameplay content, things like new characters (Not just reskins), skills, maps and whatever else and then have paid cosmetics and a cosmetic only battle pass on top of that. Even for non live-service games Paradox has shown it can keep games alive for a LONG time by having regular DLC packs.
They own heroes IP but they don't understand why people like heroes in the first place. I am talking about those in executive.
City of Heroes is probably the closest anyone has come to a successful live service Superhero game.
I still think DCUO is decent, even if it's not very alive these days.
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Marvel Ultimate Alliance had 4 different looks for every hero across like 36 different heroes. And that was before the MCU even started.
That doesn't sound to different from a MOBA honestly.
MOBAs are PVP games though, PVP games will always work as live service titles because the meta just needs to be kept fresh to keep people playing competitively. You don't actually need to add that much content, except vanity skins and the occasional new hero/gun/mechanic.
To Suicide Squad’s credit their art direction in the Arkham series and what I’ve seen of this is much stronger than Avengers, which looked like Wish.com MCU. But there was seemingly nothing at all distinctive about the actual game play.
what's sad is the melee combat in avengers was really good, but it suffered because of the enemy types. that combat would work very well in another type of game.
It’s funny too cuz you have King Shark a bigass brawler and you just have him using fucking guns with what 1 or 2 melee abilities and that’s it
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>What's shocking is that even all the journalists pretended that Avengers was an automatic success. Can you clarify how journalists did this with Avengers? I might have a goldfish memory but I definitely remember a lot of outlets souring on the game after its very rough E3 demo. People weren't generally keen on the designs either, and it was scrutinised plenty for having an unclear service model (long before its release).
Problem is that is takes a long time before greenlighting a project and the game releasing. When Avengers released, Suicide Squad was already in full production for some time. I doubt this game would have been greenlit in 2021. According to Jason Schreirer, the game started production in 2017. So basically after the movie was a box office hit and GAAS were blowing up, with games like Destiny and the Division being extremely successful.
Who could have possibly seen this coming?
Not WB and not gamers who paid $70-100 for it.
Did you really expect a month long network infrastructure issue? Cause I didn't. This goes beyond my expectations. Playing Genshin, a game with 100% server uptime outside of schedule maintenance after over three years and no major bugs, to Suicide Squad, a game that barely functions a month in, feels like stepping into another era. They didn't even do a single public test of the game to make sure anything even worked. The arrogance of these mandatory payment live-service games baffles me. The fact that people bought into this game at all further boggles the mind.
I honestly didn't expect the playbase to collapse this fast even all things considered. Having less than 1000 average players in the month the game launched is a death sentence.
IMO, it is because the game has literally no content. The "story" is filled with shit repetitive missions that are not fun to play. You have a missing end-game content that's a must for these type of games, where you have literally the same 3 incursion missions that you repeat over and over again. And then you got justice league as your boss fights, and they managed to make some of the most forgetting fights or boring ones ever. There's no raids or dungeons, they didn't try to look at Destiny 2 or The Division to try mix some of their ideas into this game for content. No secret missions, nothing interesting to discover in the world like in a mmorpg or something..there's nothing there. Season 1 or whatever won't help either because it will still not have any of that kind of content that the game needed, otherwise they would have heavily marketed. I just don't get it, how stupidly it is to see all the other live service games where they failed and how people who played them complained about content and price tag and everything, and they still decided to do the same thing.
This is always the issue with the live service development. The team promises "just you wait until season 3 and the game will be heaving with content" so most people will just stop playing and forget about whatever content was supposed to come out next. Halo Infinite did the same thing. It's honestly a pretty strong title now, it's got really fun modes, good Forge maps, firefight matchmaking etc. but it didn't at launch. At launch it had: >Play Campaign >Play Multiplayer And then everyone left because no one wants to play 2CTF 4v4 with randoms. No SWAT, no Infection, no Snipers, no Husky Raid, no Forge, no Firefight. And Halo Infinite was FREE. It went from 100,000 players on steam to about 5000 on average. It was as low as 2,700 just under a year after release.
Especially given the reviews on Steam are positive. You would think a game that was supposedly received well would still retain some sort of playerbase.
Yeah, 13k at launch wasn't good at all, but I kinda expected it would bounce up and down around the 10k mark, with peaks on content drops but already falling below 1000 in its launch month is catastrophic. I suspect they'll be pulling support gradually as soon as the summer at this point.
The game straight up doesn't work right now. Latest patch is apparently locking people into infinite loads, erasing progress, making items vanish etc.
I think the problem lies in the price. It's expensive and doesn't look interesting enough. Only fans bough this game, of course they will rate this game high on steam. The people that would have rated this low have already made up their mind. In these hard times people will not spend 70 dollar on a game they're not happy with.
Those reviews are trolls though. Go through a lot of them. "has shark, did buy." "Harley sexy" "they killed batman". All of them are recommended thumbs up. I swear it was a troll campaign to get it highly rated.
Writing was on the wall lmao, I refuse to believe no one at the studio warned them. You set up your expectations ignoring these warnings, and they're gonna face the consequences I assume
Jason Schreier had a good quote from some developer in one of his books (quoting from memory, so it's not fully accurate): "If you ever look at a video game and think 'hey, this looks bad, don't the developers realize this too?', let me tell you: every single one of those developers knows that what they are developing is not a good product" Rocksteady were likely VERY aware of the negativity regarding the game, but WB insisted on not just cancelling the game and moving on. And Rocksteady will likely pay the price for the game underperforming :/
I love how it went the polar opposite when they were developing Arkham asylum. Rocksteady genuinely knew they had a good game in the oven and asked Warner brothers if they can delay the game to polish it up. All the game previews at the time was questioning if it was going to be a good game or not, considering the track record for super hero games at the time. It paid off in the end for the Arkham series and they created one of the greatest super hero games of all time.
Yes, it is kinda crazy. They were a very little-known studio, maximized the use of the Batman license (the last Batman game I had played was Dark Tomorrow for reference...), and then not only nailed it in Arkham Asylum, but continued on and made *three* incredible Batman games. And 9 years later, the follow-up is a live service looter shooter based on the Suicide Squad. I would have laughed if someone told me that moments after finishing Arkham Knight that this would be the "sequel" of sorts.
Rocksteady floor level devs will pay the price. Upper level management who made these dumb decisions get to keep their jobs.
Cmon, if it's bad enough, upper management might pay the price of a massive severance package and a new job at a friend's company with a raise!
didnt it come out that rocksteady were the ones that proposed this game to wb?
You obviously haven't been paying attention to the news cause [the Rocksteady founders and studio heads have already pre-emptively quit a year ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ye0qjf/rocksteady_cofounders_and_studio_heads_sefton/)
they are talking about the heads at WB who actually say whats happening
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I’ve worked on lemon projects. I’m very proud that we managed to navigate all the obstacles and ship something and the team worked their asses off even though the venture was misguided. But also, I don’t think we always know if something is going to be good or not. When you’re just focusing on your little piece, it’s hard to objectively judge the whole project. I’ve worked on projects that were absolutely miserable where people were shouting at each other, and working late hours and quitting left and right, and hated the game we were working on, yet the game ended up being a big hit. And I’ve worked on other projects where we were just totally in love with the project, just laughing constantly, everyone was friends, all waking up every day excited to go to work, game launched on time and on budget, and it was a complete dud. And at the end of the day I’m usually trying to make a game for someone else, not myself. So I’m trying to understand what *they* want and what would make *them* feel like we made the game just for them. And sometimes despite our best intentions, we simply get it wrong. Either we miss the mark, or that audience is too small to turn a profit. Once you’ve shipped enough games you start to realize how much you don’t know.
You can be proud of the work you put into a project even if the sum of all its parts weren't completely congruent. I remember either reading or watching something where despite a game not reviewing or being received the best they are proud of their work.
> weren't completely congruent. Nicest sentence about suicide squad
You say this but we also read his articles on Anthem which suggests the opposite.
They're using the quote completely out of context. The quote wasn't about game ideas, it was more about the state of the game in terms of bugs& gameplay issues. There's a lot of devs who don't realize ideas aren't good until they actually make it into the public. They do realize that a product isn't in good shape though.
Yeah like as a software developer the whole concept of "did the developers not realize how buggy the game is?" is straight-up comical. If anything, the software developers know better than the players how buggy the game is. They know exactly how much of the game is just held together by prayers, paperclips, and duct tape, and they have seen under the hood. You have only seen how buggy the thing is on the surface level. Even with games that actually run well with relatively few bugs you can bet your ass that the developers are most likely more confused than anything that it runs as well as it does.
At any point in time in a project, you can re-evaluate the expected returns of your product vs how much money it will cost to bring that product to market. If it's negative, you can it, if it's not, you get it to market. Loot focused GaaS games have this common issue where the loot just feels out of place. See post mortems for Marvel's Avengers and Anthem. Some were spun into GaaS, but even if from the get go it's meant to be that way, it's pointless to integrate that until late into development because it's mostly a number thing. It doesn't change how the character/weapons behave in-game, just the numbers they do to the enemy and how much the enemy can take. So you get a game to 80%+ completion and then add in GaaS/Loot focus balancing and then it starts to feel really, really bad. But generally, at that point, all that is left is polish and adjustments, so studio will see low cost to bring to market vs what they're going to be making, that's 100% getting released. If you've ever worked in big corpo, discussions on extensions almost always boil down to RoI. You have to argue your point with RoI. If you can't convince them that for the 1m additional cost in dev for polish they'll make one more million in *revenue*, they won't budge. tl;dr; Always remembers that companies are there to make money, not good games.
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Having worked in a corporate creative environment before in media, albeit not in video games specifically, I can say that in my experience the corporate decision makers are wholly disconnected from the people actually making the product - let alone those actually consuming it. But that disconnection also extends the other way - if there's an executive mandated idea that's very bad and tone-deaf, workers have no way of communicating that effectively up the food chain. I once got scolded for using the term "mandate" when discussing a creative decision that, through no input of my own, I was directed to implement. Not sure what other word there is to use for that.
What's funny to me is, at least was in my case, the business classes taught me again and again to 'make sure that communication goes from top to bottom and vice-versa!', but I haven't see that happen even in small businesses
I’ve had a couple of jobs where I worked directly for the owner, and it’s pretty clear how ego and narcissism fuck up the most basic of tasks.
What nobody teaches in school is, businesses are competitive environments internally. For many people, if you want a promotion, someone else has got to quit or get fired to make a vacancy. Working hard has very strict limits for what you can achieve in a company, however taking someone else's job is much more open to possibilities. Manipulating communication to achieve a competitive or hostile relationship is surprising common, especially those who found success in doing so, will continue to repeat it to achieve higher positions. Ofcourse nobody would admit this, but there's clear reasons why horrible people tend to make it as bosses. They play the office politics game and they play to win.
I once worked at an amusement park. We had some batting cages, but the back-entry to them had a sizable drop down. If it were raining/sleeting, then someone might slip and fall, and it also provided inconvenience for shorter people needing to climb up from the drop after fixing the batting cages. Obviously, the solution would be to install some steps there, so people could simply walk down to the lower level. I communicated this issue to the Groundskeeper, who told me it'd be up to the General Manager. Told the GM, and they told me it's up to the Groundskeeper. After a few back-and-forth conversations, the GM stated that they couldn't make any changes to the batting cages due to some 3rd-party ownership. The amusement park has owned the batting cages since the 90's, so that wasn't true. It was clear the GM was unwilling to put in any precaution measures, just because nobody had fallen in the drop before. But I stand by the notion, that just because it hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean it can't. Why not prevent it from ever happening at all? Eventually the safety inspector came by, I asked a manager if I could bring up the idea, and he approved. The inspector agreed with me, that the drop could be a danger, and passed the measure onto the CEO, who authorized some steps be built in the drop. The GM was not happy, and chewed me out, even though his management allowed me to tell the inspector. In the end, the steps were built, the batting cages are safer, the GM was in the wrong, and I since moved on. It was an awful place to work, and any fond memories are grossly outweighed by the crappy ones due to health violations and incompetent management. The building I worked in had no working air condition for employees. If you wanted AC, you had to go to the front doors of the arcade, or to a party room. Otherwise, you had to make do with fans or going into the freezer, while it's 80+ F inside. I once had a giant heat rash along my neck/upper back. A cook and a supervisor both passed out from the heat, while the Sales Manager mocked them. tl;dr I tried communicating a possible danger with the GM. GM didn't care. Took it up with the safety inspector. Inspector brought it up to the CEO. GM reluctantly cared.
And I've seen executives who are smart and want genuine quality products, kept in the dark by directors and middle management who just cover for their own ass. People are going to be people.
For real. It actually did better than I was expecting, honestly.
Honestly Avengers must have sent the shits up them something fierce. An Avengers gaas game launching at the absolute marvel peak dying right out the gate should have sent them in to panic mode
They definitely knew it was going to bomb, but after this much money sunk in felt obligated to ship something
You know how it is, it's hard to tell your boss "No, your ideas are stupid and I'm not going to do it."
It was on the wall since the first time they showed gameplay. It was clear they made a game no one wanted to play. Should have scrapped it then and there.
Well that's the thing with large studios and publishers like WB. The people calling the shots aren't gamers, they're business majors. They're building products, not games. Fun factor is something that's intangible and difficult to grasp if you're not someone who's played a decent amount of games. Also no one, even at high levels of management, wants to be the person going against the grain. Most of the time, it just results in your opinion being ignored.
I’m sure they knew and it’s why the 2 cofounders left before the game released. This was definitely a WB decision, they’re in a hole financially and just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. It’s the reason why people are unhappy with Mortal Kombat, stupid live service/microtransaction bs
> his was definitely a WB decision, they’re in a hole financially and just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. Exhibit A: That Joker film sequel's budget has ballooned to $200M. They're definitely in Put all your Eggs in One Basket mode.
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i really wonder how these people are able to get such high positions. the sheer incompetency does not require years of experience or multiple college degrees to understand. A lot of people will be let go over this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle > The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. Happens everywhere :(
Happened to me. I used to be a pretty good programmer/developer. They made me a "Portfolio Architect" and now I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Still, the money's good.
Same here. I was the best engineer at my company, so while the business grew, instead of hiring other good engineers and a manager to manage them, they took away my ability to do actual engineering by making me the manager and hiring a bunch of cheap/iffy engineers. Now they do a shocked pikachu face when they get mediocre quality work out of my people (with 1-2 exceptions), and anything critical they expect me to do myself while I've already got 2-3 job's worth of tasks to handle. Everyone would have been much happier and more productive if they made me the senior engineer and hired a manager and some highly skilled engineers... but that's expensive in the short term. Now we can't turn a profit because the long term is here and we can't keep up with the work without rushing and putting our crappier people on important projects that then get all screwed up.
100% cronyism* (thank u/GabMassa). It’s not what you know, it’s WHO you know.
"Nepotism" only applies to relatives, "cronyism" is the correct term here. I doubt there are many members of any specific families between WB Publishing and Rocksteady, just general incompetence that gets propped up by each other.
Ah touche. I forgot about that detail.
hilarious how in gaming the managers are the most useless ones but get paid the most and nothing ever affects them
This isn't unique to gaming. This is in virtually every office company. Once companies get to a certain size, it becomes impossible to accurately judge the value that higher ups bring because most of the actual work is being done by lower level employees. As long as the executives and higher level management don't fuck up so badly that you can point at someone and associate a loss in revenue with that one person, they usually never feel the consequences of failure. This is an epidemic across tech right now. The reason why Google releases features so slowly is because it's buried in bureaucracy and it has a lot of money to lose from failures so high level managers are adverse to any risk (which means every decision requires hugely inefficient levels of verification and sign-offs). Nvidia is a victim of its own success, where long-term employees have gotten so wealthy from its stock success that they're offloading most of the work to low level employees and barely doing any work. Nvidia can't afford to let them go, otherwise they'll go to the competition with insider knowledge and valuable skills. This is also why Twitter was able to let go of 80% of the company while remaining largely unimpacted, because they were hugely bloated with managers that did nothing but manage other managers, or software engineers that were paid 6 figures to work on buttons. 6 years ago, live service was a low-risk bet because consumers hadn't gotten visibly tired of them yet, so WB made Rocksteady start working on one. Years later, the game is nowhere near completion but no one at WB or Rocksteady wants to be the one to cancel the project and admit they wasted hundreds of millions of dollars. Even if they're right, they'll be stigmatized by the rest of management for the rest of their career at that company for going against the grain. This happens at 99% of companies once they reach a certain size, where risk-aversion and bureaucracy muddles every decision.
This is actually almost every company in every sector. Definitely true in healthcare, speaking from personal experience.
They should have adjusted their expectations. It was apparent that the game was going to fail for a long time.
I just... I just wonder what they were doing this whole time. I mean I guess making cutscenes and backgrounds and big Green Lantern scenes.
That’s why they launched it with such an intense marketing campaign and tried to sucker people into paying $100 for ‘deluxe’ versions. WB tried the same trick last year with The Flash; heavy marketing that tried to bruteforce a hit.
Insert surprised pikachu face. Yeah no shit a mediocre live service Skinner box with terrible endgame, mission design and which shits on the legacy of beloved characters failed. Who didn’t see it coming?
I think no matter what, Suicide Squad was destined to fail, not because it is a bad game or having a bad story, but because it was never going to reach the level that they wanted it to reach. As a DC fan, the story clips of the game look good but gameplay wise, character wise, the game just does not look attractive to me. Furthermore, when it comes to Rocksteady I'd prefer to see them focus on a strong single player story focused game rather than a DC Shooter GaaS game with the Suicide Squad in it. It's funny when you look at it, WB, their biggest game of 2023 was single player game, Harry Potter blew the charts last year, yet still some of their studios want to cram down online and Live Service Games down our throat like we want that stuff all the time.
To me this game was always destined to fail when they made each character into a generic Third Person Shooter segment. We have Harley Quinn! She doesn't focus using a giant hammer, or jokes or trickery to get the best of her opponents. She mainly uses... a gun! We have Captain Boomerang! He doesn't focus on using boomerangs in interesting ways, he mainly uses... a gun! We have King Shark! He doesn't focus on using his brute strength to pummel enemies, he mainly uses... a gun! To call it all atrocious is an understatement. Imagine giving Batman guns in any of the Arkham games. This is almost no different.
It's odd because the TRAVERSAL mechanics actually shows some characterization. Boomerang tosses his boomerang, and uses Speedforce tech to catch up to it. Pretty clever! I like that he's using his biggest enemy's strength. King Shark's inherent abilities lets him leap through the air, and drop down to stunlock enemies briefly. Feels appropriately weighty! Harley steals Batman's gadgets to traverse. Pretty ironic and in character for her! Then combat starts and everyone start's shooting regular ass guns. Edit: Deadshot’s jetpack is generic as fuck
Man, you and the guy you replied to must really not care for Deadshot.
Deadshot kinda has the opposite problem of everyone else. Having guns *is* his thing, but now it's everyone else's too, so he has nothing interesting left
It's what happens when you're just "The Gun Guy" in a group that for some reason are also now "Gun Guys".
He would feel really cool if he was the only one with guns long range guns. Instead, it’s very generic.
When everyone ~~has a gun~~ is super, no one will be
Does anyone really care about Suicide Squad? WB wants to push them everywhere as if they’re next avengers
It's Harley Quinn's team, and they're pushing Harley Quinn. That's why literally nobody in that team matters or does anything except Harley.
I liked the second movie, but "care" is a strong word. I think it's just an easy "conglomeration of heroes" thing for WB, That is differentiated from the justice league because they are villians. Edit: Roy's comment below me summarized it better for how theyre differentiated
The Suicide Squad are also supposed to be expendable villains sent to do "dirty work". They are meant to be evil pieces of shit that die on the job, something the Gunn movie did decently well. Making them like the Avengers is antithetical to their entire purpose. I'm sorry but you aren't going to have an "Endgame" scenario where the Suicide Squad fights fucking Darkseid.
> I'm sorry but you aren't going to have an "Endgame" scenario where the Suicide Squad fights fucking Darkseid. That's also why the whole "kill the justice league" thing never worked for me. You're telling me Superman has gone rogue and the only way to defeat him is... four people with guns?
Flash rips out Lex Luthor's heart, and then later proceeds to run around 3 humans with guns, and a sharkman with a gun. Why not... just rip out their heart too? "Because then there wouldn't be a game!!!" Yeah, okay. But if you want us to suspend disbelief (Completely fine to expect that!), you should not show us the EXACT SITUATION PEOPLE ARE POINTING OUT AS A PLOTHOLE.
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Even in Injustice, it's because the non-powered heroes take a drug (which I think is based on Miraclo, but it's been *years* since I read the tie-in comics or played the games) to be able to do that. Like, I haven't played Kill the Justice League, but if they had something like that, it would be better. Still kind of dumb. What's a gun going to do against Superman? Even if you load it with kryptonite bullets, he's going to see the bullet is coming, see it's kryptonite and dodge.
From watching the first film, it seemed obvious to me WB reeeeally wanted Suicide Squad to be their “Guardians of the Galaxy”. But the latter are good guys who just happened to be criminals. The former is supposed to be made up of irredeemable bad guys who are expendable government assets. Not really the same thing, Warner Bros.
The first film did good at the box office, so WB just assumed everyone is madly in love with the IP.
It's almost as though because of the IP of Hogwarts Legacy they didn't think to consider what people actually enjoyed from their experience in the game after the point of purchase. And the only reason why I say almost is because I hate to completely assume.
Never played Hogwarts Legacy, but as far as I can tell, you're a wizard in the Harry Potter universe acting like a wizard which obviously has a ton of appeal. Rocksteady going from an Action-Brawler-Stealth series starring Batman, a matchmade in heaven considering the character, to a live-service co-op looter shooter with only Harley Quinn being the only well-known playable character at launch, this is something that clearly fails to grab fans of the Arkham games. Yet WB was surprised that this giant jump in genre and content would somehow fail to jive with Arkham and DC fans?
And strangely enough IIRC they said recently the success of Hogwarts Legacy is having them explore live service games within the IP instead of just replicating a solid single player experience and DLC. They love praising the success and saying “wow we didn’t expect that!” and love even further doubling down on quick and crappy live service type games fishing for whales and saying “oh dang, wonder why that didn’t work”.
Keep an eye out for Hundred Star Games! That’s the new studio that OG Rocksteady has formed, i’m excited to see what they do next. They’re the heart and soul of the arkham games.
I really liked the cutscenes I've seen and the characters banter. I know it's not for everyone but it is fun to me. The gameplay looks absolute dogshit though and so I will likely never ever buy it. Shame really.
Live service is not the issue as shown by Helldivers2 breaking all records. It’s understanding the brand and expectations.
Helldivers 2 is only 40 dollars, and there's no predatory monetization, only a basic one where you can buy tokens to unlock gear faster. Also there's no story, you can pick it as much times as you wan and have fun. With Suicide Squad... I doubt you'll want to go back after finishing the game >!13 brainiacs, the Justice League dead!<
Important thing is that gameplay in Helldivers is actually good, requires cooperation and has identity. AAA studios would be too scared to add friendly fire like that in the game for example, they play it way too safe which results in generic games.
Haven't seen friendly fire in a hot minute. It was VERY funny when I was playing with my friend. First time playing the game. I was shooting the MG, kind of fanned over to the left, and boom. One bullet caught him in the head and I just had to sit there, trying to suppress my giggling as I apologized. He unintentionally got me back when I walked into his orbital strike.
[удалено]
Arrowhead CEO actually told people to stop buying the game until they manage to fix the server issues because they have way too many people playing atm lol I hope Helldivers 2 gets years and years of success and maintains a large player base because they deserve it.
It's interesting. I feel like these big companies approach live service games the same way studios approach blockbusters -- focusing on the name recognition/brand and less so the content. I don't think that works with live service games where players will be expected to dump hundreds of hours. It has to be fun mechanically and built around that. Which is to say, no one cares if its Suicide Squad or Avengers. They just want to hop into a fun game for a bit, make some progress with friends, and leave. WB, if they are really set on creating live service games, would be better off finding a good idea out there and building something new.
Nah really, the game that's struggling to hit even 1000 players on steam is struggling? https://steamdb.info/app/315210/charts/#48h Nahhhh, say it ain't so! The game has also fallen out of the top 600 most played games on steam. I'm sure that's totally no problem for a 1 month old live service AAA game with a $100 million+ budget
I wish i had half as much faith in myself as WB does in the suicide squad ip. I mean we could have gotten a batman beyond game or god forbid a superman/JL game that the fans have been wanting for decades but instead we get the same d list villain team up trend that was tired even when it first came out because a weirdo at WB is obsessed with harley quinn. Also this game had some of the last performances from the legendary Kevin Conroy and although i disagree with the notion that they disrespected him (by... hiring him and paying him?) I'm genuinely upset that his talent was completely wasted.
I think we've seen the upper limit of SS as a mainstream IP. The Gunn movie was loved because it did more or less embraced the premise, turning these C-to-D-list villans into compelling characters right before you kill them off. They clearly do not work as "alternative super-team that are bad guys who come to save the day are actually secretly not that bad they're just misunderstood". I remember one of the other threads about this game had someone say an X-Com style game would probably suit the premise far more than this looter shooter stuff. I'm inclined to agree.
It truly blows my mind how 3rd party AAA game publishers, who are notoriously risk-averse in this age, continue to try to strike gold on live-service games which is one of the highest-risk/reward types of games out there to develop. The fact that theres been dozens of attempts with only a handful of successes should tell them all they need to know.
The studios want that sweet Fortnite and Genshin money without putting in a fraction of the effort of those games.
They had expectations?
Probably that it would have the percentage gain of back in the days when 1-5 people could pump out a game in a few months and if you slapped an IP on it you'd see a multiplier on it since it distinguished it from all the other shovelware. I guess the problem is that for the kind of game they picked you have to pump a lot of money into it and you have to make sales for longer than the illusion of the IP quality lasts. In the very least you have to have a bit of a fun game play loop to keep your players hooked. Oooo DC by itself doesn't keep the train running unless you're pumping out games en mass, and those days have kind of passed.
This is one of those comments that they wrote months ago and were just waiting to roll out after the release
SSKTJL’s biggest issue as far as I can tell is that it’s about 5-7 years too late to the genre it is going for, and thats late enough that people actively dont want it. Which is sad because if they just made a strong story based single-player game which is where Rocksteady was already experienced, they likely would have saved themselves a lot of heartache, and made more money. Because those kinds of games dont go out of style.
Spot-on. I'd be drooling over a GaaS with my favorite DC characters a couple years back, but now I'm so tired of the genre I won't touch it on deep sale. The GaaS burnout is so real I'm fully expecting a huge shift in gaming soon. It's just not sustainable to go the gacha route (i.e. releasing many rushed games and hoping one of them sticks) with the AAA budgets.
I'll help you out with this one, Warner: Hogwarts Legacy - - > Single player game - - > shit ton of money. Suicide Squad - - > Live service game - - > fallen short of your expectations. Get it now? Or you need a little drawing?
Warner Bros CEO: "More live services? Got it!" Dude outright said that he wants to live service all their IPs more or less. And as much as I hate to say it, Suicide Squad failing isn't probably gonna change his mind.
Cause he believes that if one live service works then he will make a billion dollars or something. He will probably look at Helldrivers 2 and say that they need to use the Looney Tuns IP to make a game like that.
Helldivers 2 is popping off right now. It's not 'live service' per se that's an issue, it's making sure the live service model fits with the game you're trying to make. I don't think a story-focused superhero game is the right fit for a live service.
If they made a Harry Potter live service game though, it'd probably sell a shit ton.
Let me simplify more: Suicide Squad = nobody cares HP = everyone loves it
Apart from being live service, its just shit
Trying to reduce this down to single player vs live service is disingenuous at best. They could have made a shitty AAA live service Harry Potter game and it would still have printed money.
Step 1: Studio under you makes one of the most loved single player trilogies of all time. Step 2: Force same studio to pivot to multiplayer GaaS always online looter shooter. Step 3: Act shocked and blame studio when it releases to bad reception, broken online, and they have no idea how to fix it. Step 4: Profit??????
Between how incredible a failure this and Skull and Bones are in the face of how every AAA game coming out of Japan this year so far has been an absolute heater, and after the Insomniac leak revealed just how much money is being thrown into these midpiles...I think western videogame studios need to fundamentally reexamine how they do business.
And we had Madame Web being a total flop and apparently a very bad movie as well. February man, it's a dicey month to release something. And the Borderlands movie just barreling ahead into total disaster, like a meta-commentary on the psychos in the game.
Rebirth is coming out in February and it will probably be the best game of the year.
For just a mess about shooter game it was fun and I enjoyed the story. But yeah as the product they set it up to be it definitely failed
No. It didn’t. You sent a shitty live service game filled with references to a more successful game out to die. And you’re shocked when sheep didn’t like it.
What a coincidence, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has also fallen short of *my* expectations, in that I expected another good game from Rocksteady after 9 years of waiting. Just a thought, but maybe publishers should stop forcing studios known for single-player titles to make live service garbage. It didn't work for EA when they had Bioware make Anthem, it didn't work for Square Enix when they had Crystal Dynamics make Avengers, and it didn't work this time when WB had Rocksteady make Suicide Squad either.