Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad game is complete – now what?

The Suicide Squad is dead, sort of. Long live the Suicide Squad… sort of.

Almost a full year after its launch, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League finished this week with its last major update. Said ending is a bit odd: after finally whittling down Brainiac’s last health bars, players watch an animated cutscene narrated by Harley Quinn in which the Squad and the living, now-free Justice League members that Brainiac cloned—and are was on the receiving end of the Squad sometimes youthful brutality— band together to take down the Coluan before setting out to set things right both in their universe and in others terrorized by the various Brainaics. It’s a somewhat definitive ending that also feels like it came suddenly, especially when you consider how quickly Warner Bros. they wanted to clear their hands of this project.

In any case, the question remains Suicide Squad is “what’s next”, especially for Rocksteady. The answer is easy, but not when we look at the studio’s contemporaries. After failing to get his Anthem remastering continues, BioWare has turned to remastering the Mass effect trilogy and begins full development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. By that logic, you’d think they’d owe us quite a bit Batman: Arkham remasters to ease Rocksteady back into singleplayer, but Return to Arkham exists, and Arkham Knight turns 10 in June. (WB Montreal who did Arkham Origins, helped with of the squad development and recently laid off staffas he did Rocksteady shortly thereafter.) Last June, sources said Bloomberg Rocksteady’s immediate future is helping put together a 2023 director’s cut. Hogwarts Legacy, after that… we don’t know, but it’s probably a single-player mulligan to get the studio back on track.

Online, the popular wait and hope is another Batman game, preferably one that just writes Suicide Squad excluded as non-canonical or does not address it. By now, wouldn’t it be better if the studio got out of the Batman hole and tackled another DC character? before of the squad edition, various (and later debunked) rumors claimed that Rocksteady was making a Superman game, and from the highs of that game, its Metropolis recreation was considered pretty good. And if not the Man of Steel, literally any other non-Wonder Woman character would do at this point. So far, this team has been working on Batman for just over 15 years, and it’s about time we let someone new take the hood, whether in Gotham’s present or future.

Alternatively, it might serve Rocksteady well to break completely out of the DC cage and do something of their own. To date, his only non-DC game is his 2006 debut title Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Something brand new should probably have been the direction to go knight, but this is as good an opportunity as any to move forward. Returning to Arkham well once again it would only make things even weirder than they were when we learned it was canon for these games. Making the team spend years and millions of dollars creating an excuse for one player isn’t the best use of anyone’s time, and it’s not like we won’t get another at-bat after all. For all the fears people had about Insomniac turning into a Marvel gaming machine, that’s what happened with Rocksteady, which is clearly full of talented people who should get the chance to spread their wings. recently Naughty dog and Ryu Ga Gatoku have introduced their first all-new properties in years, and I’d be curious to see what Rocksteady can do outside the confines of a known comic book property. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what an original sci-fi, horror, western, or any other game from this team looks like?

In a just world, Suicide Squad would have gotten away with better, less compromising terms, or at least Rocksteady wouldn’t be left footing the bill for it. As it is, we can only hope that WB and its management will just let the game studio figure out what it wants to do with what it’s best at and cook from there. Other studios have recovered from worse, but the ability to let go of less-than-stellar titles isn’t available to every developer these days, and it would be a nasty full-circle moment for a team that’s built a lot of goodwill to now.

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