You know by now what a sick, morbid, puppy I am. Drawn to the swirling void of the decaying like a vulture circling it's crinkled cadavers roasting to a fine boil in the midday sun. I'm a scavenger bird, ravenous and opportunistic, pouncing on weakness and gorging myself on it's last struggling gasps gurgled betwixt the plunge of my razor beak. Sure, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice league is a dead thing, we've all pronounced it and are happy to see the thing go- (except for Paul Tassi, the Live Service fiend who subjects himself to this torment like a true sadist)- but my god will I savour in the struggle! And with evert failure turn back around on an industry so eager to hop into this same wide-open grave with the vindication of practicality- mama-bird didn't rear no chump!
The latest news is... less than ideal. Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League managed to scare off those that stuck around the rough launch with- lo and behold- an even rougher first season that managed to get everyone at their lowest and ensure them that there was nothing more in the team's bag of tricks. The Stronghold missions that were dangling over people's heads turned out to be more endlessly recycled content, all of the Joker's narrative scenes were shown off in the trailers because there was that little to him as a character. Brainiac still hasn't figured out that if he really wants to kill the Justice League he should try, I dunno, using any strategy that the team haven't already been documented as being able to defeat?
Making any Live Service works requires that it's services actually be partaken in my a regular stream of players who are willing to engage with the the various skins and paid MTX that are released throughout it's lifetime. It's the reason why most Live Services are developed specifically to ward away large crowds a few weeks after launch, because the smaller group they maintain are the dedicated who can be squeezed for all their worth without kicking up a fuss everytime they drop something extortionately overpriced onto the storefront. See the big review bomb landing on the Tekken 8 thanks to it's post-release dropping of an MTX store? That's something that Live Services manage to avoid by keeping such a tight knit team of players. (Why do you think you never hear about Fallout 76's badly priced MTX? It ain't because they stopped, I can tell you that much!)
But the kind of numbers that SSKTJL is seeing, at least on PC through Steam tracker, look too low even to sustain that. Hanging between the sub-thousands is not really where any aspiring service game should be planted, and although we know their numbers are better on Console- the general consensus is that the game dropped the ball. Of course, this is a spiralling downfall because if the game cannot generate a sufficient enough revenue then the team cannot justify funding significant enough revenue to transform their lacklustre snooze-fest into a game worth generating an audience, thus the game sinks lower and lower into the metrics until it gets swallowed under the wave of better, less pricey, games. Although what if I told you that the stubborn lunatics over at Rocksteady are thinking of riding this one far past it's prime?
According to unconfirmed reports from the kind of folk who are digging through source code in order to drum up reveals of upcoming character additions- there is apparently enough evidence to indicate that Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League contains the framework to release 5 whole seasons of content before the abject failure of the product catches up with them and Rocksteady are forced to shut the thing down. That's just over a year of 'support' wherein we can morbidly watch how they keep the game updated with no money coming in and a skeleton crew of player keeping cobwebs out of the servers. Which makes it actually a heck of a lot more ambitious then I ever suspected the team of managing. Who could have forseen Suicide Squad escaping 2024?
Now we've already seen some silhouettes of the first year of content, and seeing how little effort went into bringing the first season to fruition, it's probably save to assume that Mrs Freeze up to Deadshot have already been developed to some degree internally. We've already seen that their lines have already been recorded. (For what little that's worth. Joker currently has the least amount of lines of any member of the team by a country mile. Seems the DLC content is just kind of plopped into the mix instead of thoughtfully integrated.) I suspect that the maintenance team, whom I'm going to be courteous to the core Rocksteady and assume already have control over the game, which is why season 1 was so pathetic, only really have to keep the servers running and perhaps polish off a few last minute bugs before throwing these last members into the game. Actual new development probably won't be covered in the 5 seasons.
Of course, we already know that this live service narrative is all going to be about course correction as we revive the Justice League and restore the world yadda yadda- (Will that include Wonder Woman? She was killed pretty much outright, without being a Brainiac pawn.) but will it fix the inherent disconnect between the Arkham universe of games and this totally bizarro iteration pretending to be it's successor? You know, this world where the secretive Batman who killed himself publicly as soon as his identity was revealed would just join a public facing Justice League and jauntily recall his adventures for the Justice Hall museum? A world where the writers seem to have gotten their psychotic and Joker-loving Harley mixed up with the modern iteration from the Harley Quinn Show- lacking any connective tissue bringing that character from one end to the other? How about the Deadshot thing? There really is no patching this leaky ship, is there?
But 'Suicide Squad Kills Rocksteady's Reputation' appears to not be giving up and that is morbidly commendable at the very least. There at least won't be a total abandonment of the hot mess like was originally most likely- they'll try to clear their name and at least won't leave an empty unfinished story in this game's place. Of course, we'll save the back pats for whether or not the team go out of their way to patch in an 'offline mode' so that the game doesn't become a glorified drinks coaster once support stops. Only after that can we have our drinks, pop those pills and forget this game ever existed as, ideally, Rocksteady get back to making knock-out single player masterpieces again. Pretty please?
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