"Reports finger a likely culprit in the salaciously, scandalous, scruple-less shrew: Spider-Man!"
-Thanks for that correspondence from insider and fellow Journalist- J.J. Jameson.
Wasn't there like- a DC game announced? No, not just announced. That game was revealed. And like- big revealed. With multimillion dollar showings at the 'DC Fandome', big famous actors popping up to advertise the thing, trailers, gameplay, the whole nine yards. I'm pretty sure it was- oh god, it's the very last game that Kevin Conroy voiced Batman in, isn't it? In fact, it's the very last property that Kevin voiced Batmen in at this point! And that game was supposed to be out a few times over at this point. What was it called again... oh that's right! Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League! And what's going on with that production right now? Oh, it's been delayed again. For the hundredth time. And the Subreddit is largely inactive. And the memeified Arkham Subreddit gets more active coverage for a franchise that has been dormant for eight years? This isn't a good sign, now is it?
Now Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League is a game being made under the same brand as the original Arkham games, is said to be set in the same universe, (Which is going to retroactively make it really hard to justify why Bruce never called on his Justice League pals during any of the major incidents throughout the Arkham franchise. Is he stupid?) and was going to feature a game version of the most famous SS line-up in the entire groups history. (I know it's perfectly appropriate and fine, but I'm going to not use that abbreviation to describe the group ever again if that's alright with you. Cool? Cool.) So in essence this was going to be a sort of Co-op Arkham, which sounds like the coolest thing ever and what could possibly not work out about that, right? I mean- when has the Arkham games ever not hit their landing? Okay Gotham Knights was a bit... unfortunate, but I mean there are other games to get excited for, right? So what's the deal then?
Well, the problem is that with every layer of mystique that has been pulled back on this game the tide of the conversation has turned in on itself more and more. And not in the typical way we see this when dreams get crystallised into pragmatism, but in the horrific way as everyone's absolute worst beliefs about the game slowly get validated to a nauseating reality that this game has done everything wrong. It's followed all the worst trends, learnt all the worst lessons for the industry and totally misjudged it's fanbase and their needs. It's pretty much a note-for-note copy of the 'Daredevil show' situation for Marvel, where they've sat down and made a show totally antithetical to everything that people wanted from the return of Charlie Cox. Now it just seems that all the delays are just delaying the inevitable disappointment because they're not gonna sit back and just remake the entire product, now are they?
Suicide Squad is a live service game, in the vein of all that stands for. In a world that just saw the delisting of Babylon's Fall, of Square Enix's Avengers and the critical evisceration of Gotham Knights for being a blatant 'Live Service repurposed into a real game' job. People are sick of the trend, I'm glad to say. They're sick of their time being monopolised by games that all want to feel like a job, they're sick of the insubstantial time wasting and barebones content that a Live Service needs to familiarise and train it's audience with in order to survive. They're sick of the drip-feed of content, the gear systems, the unsolved narratives, the gameplay loops, the cash shops, the waste of everyone's time. People just wanted to run around a totally new city in the Arkham universe as Harley Quinn. But somehow things got worse after the game was shown off! Which is just... special!
You see, if there was one thing that people could hold onto even over everything else, it was the diversity of the Suicide Squad as a team being just enough to ensure gameplay variety for everyone. I mean you've got the giant carnivorous King Shark, the teleporting captain Boomerang, the bat-wielding Harley Quinn and the jetpack donned Deadshot- could you imagine any more varied a cast? Well... as it turns out- all of these characters do have their unique talents, but as 'slot-in' abilities rather than baked into their gameplay essence. That's because every single one of this team totes big guns and stupidly open movement options. Meaning everyone plays the same. And their foes? Identical purple aliens with giant purple weak spots that the players have to shoot mindlessly until they pop. Yes, even the Helicopter has giant bulbous purple weakspots. Because creativity and ingenuity are both dead.
Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League has no open world. It does have a battlepass. Cosmetics won't be unlocked rewards throughout the game, but store-locked assets sold under the increasingly tenuous excuse that 'They don't effect gameplay so you can't be mad!' Yeah, well watch me! It seems to have traded in combat intricacy for stat chasing and gear min maxing. It's essentially every single thing that an Arkham fan doesn't want. And after the failure of Gotham Knights to amass an audience to it's stable, it's actually laughably, and ironically, suicidal to bet this hard on magickly conjuring up a brand new audience to make up for the one's that are being driven away by pitchforks. You would have to be clinically insane not to see how bad of an idea this is. Which is probably why the founders of the game studio straight bailed before this game revealed it's arse to the world, leaving the company in such a rush they left cloud-shaped impressions in their wake.
What we essentially have here is a product finely tuned to be everything that the target audience does not want and, given evidence of every other Superhero game that has gone down this road, is therefore destined to be a financial failure. The fact that the game keeps getting pushed back seems almost strategic at this point, as though Warner Bros are trying to figure out which quarterly earnings report this oncoming failure can be tucked with to safely swallow it out of view. But they haven't prepared enough, not even nearly. Suicide Squad is going to hound this world class studio if it turns out every bit as boring as it looks, and their next title will suffer for it. The company are basically paying millions to waste money and sully their next project's reputation prematurely: truly a brilliant move from the headcases in management.
And after this year you know they're going to be left looking like the fools. After an incredible year of games developed exactly the way that people want, instead of to a 'profitable mandate'. Meanwhile Live Service games have been dropping like flies and even the grandfather of them all, the proof of concept which launched this whole mad house to begin with- Destiny is dropping key developers in order to roll with the times. At this point there is no sane reason to chase the Live Service train anymore, and any motor-mouthed executive with Fortnite blinding their eyes who insists otherwise is welcome to try diving through active plane propellers and seeing if their warped sense of luck serves them just as well there. What's that? They wouldn't be that stupid? Funny, then maybe that same caution should be applied to an even more unlikely statistic- matching Fortnite's success, no? (Give us Arkham back you damn ghouls!)
No comments:
Post a Comment