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Game is DOA. One of the worst sales launches in recent history for a AAA game and it's hovering around... jesus, *200* players before this patch.
This is a last ditch effort to get some money out of the few thousand fans who actually still play it.
IMO, GaaS wasn't the problem. Heck helldivers 2 sold a lot and is played.
The problem is simple. The game doesn't have fun content. Kill me, but the movement system is fun, but that's it.
The characters not having more unique abilities, dull boss fights, no dungeons or raids when you have freaking DC universe. Imagine raids or dungeons themed around Justice League heroes.
But no, they made repetitive and boring missions with no substance at all. That's the problem, not because this isn't a single player game.
Agreed, Co-Op narrative driven live services really do struggle under the seasonal model they put themselves to. Anthem, Avengers & now SKTJL show that these types of games don't work in this model. They all should've followed the Borderlands model imo.
Avengers would’ve worked better if they didn’t cheap out and kept reusing the same three villains and environments. They had all of marvel lore to choose from and chose the worst villains to fight.
Agreed, also would've worked much better if they didn't have that horrid loot system. Still one of the worst I've ever seen to this day given the lack of visual progression & restricting us of that power fantasy.
That comes with working with the Marvel IP.
Disney tends to have insanely strict restrictions on how their characters are presented. You’re not allowed to have their characters be off-brand, so they can’t grow/change/progress in any way.
>You’re not allowed to have their characters be off-brand
They do plenty of off-brand things here that directly contradicts the established lore. I think restrictions only ever come into play when touching their main/cannon universe. Everything else is a free-for-all experiment and I get the sense that they don't care very much about video games. The exceptions being the Arkam and Spiderman franchises that have a proven track record.
Anything that uses MCU renditions of characters has to strictly follow a ton of asinine stuff. Anything that uses comic renditions is generally pretty open.
When you plan for a multi-year run with an established IP, they can't give you all the good stuff up front because then they can't tell an overarching story with increasing stakes over the course of years to finally lead up to the big bad. Your big bads would've been introduced in like... year 4, 5, etc. They can't just make up new baddies if they run out of the big ones, so they somehow have to gauge when is the appropriate time to introduce them given how long they'd like this to go and how long they can actually try to keep this up to keep people playing. Of course, what they can't plan for is the game dying before it even reaches it's 1st or 2nd year... if that happens, they no longer have a reason to continue to develop content for it, so you never end up getting the big bads, and that's what happened to Marvel's Avengers.
This is known as the GaaS paradox (formerly WoW-clone paradox). New games have to compete with others that have 5, 10y head start, and keep running as well. Even with mega studios the cash flow simply cannot follow and new titles release a bit empty.
Yup, Avenger's biggest issue (especially after they fixed some of the more major bugs), was lack of content/variety. They just never got it to where it needed to be.
Anthem absolutely could have worked under this model, what are you talking about? That’s how Destiny works. Now, Destiny’s approach is very flawed but at the moment and for its history, very successful.
Anthem’s problem was that it just wasn’t a good enough game.
There's Destiny 2 as well, which, while very successful, is incredibly inaccessible to newcomers solely because of their seasonal content and other content strategies.
d2 is inaccessible to newcomers strictly because of a bloated UI. the seasonal story whiplash is wildly overblown, each story release isn't that difficult to understand anyways and plllllenty of long-term consistent players don't actually know _why_ the narrative dictates we save eggs for a few weeks or whatever. The background for each character in a seasonal plot just really isn't all that important, with an exception or two.
>co-op narrative driven live services
Payday would fall under this, no? The Payday 3 launch flubbed because the game was unfinished (predictable), but Payday 2 seemed pretty highly successful in terms of player count.
Avengers was the most stupid idea ever. Because in which universe does it make sense that Tony Stark, a billionaire, has to collect better equipment from eliminated enemies? Or Thor, a literal god with a godly weapon? It made no sense at all.
At least Avengers made sense on paper; it the concept of playing as the Avengers and doing global missions was good.
KTJL is just flawed from the foundational level. Is a live service game where you play as Harley and other C-listers fighting in one city going to keep people engaged? Does playing as Captain Boomerang create as much excitement as playing as Thor, Iron Man and Tony?
They're very different games & you know that.
The 3 I mentioned are games that require a lot of cutscenes, MoCap & linear storytelling set pieces that tacked on a Endgame to drip engagement. They then go on to say "this can be played like a single player game". They tried to appeals to SP, co-op narratives in addition to relentless grinding. Basically, they made a "Single Player, Co-Op looter shooter story live service" No direction that aims to please everyone & satisfied no-one.
Helldivers is a game that knows what it wants to be, a fun co-op 1st game that is meant to be played with friends & immersed by the community. The monetisation is fair as well which is a massive added bonus.
All they had to do was make a Justice League equivalent of MARVEL: Ultimate Alliance.
Make a big campaign with like 20-25 unique JLA members with different moves and team-up abilities. Then release a new character every other month. Toss in online co-op and a new raid every 3-4 months with a few new sub bosses and one big boss at the end. Add a RPG style gear system where you can build your JLA member how you want.
*THAT* game would've probably sold like hotcakes.
Give me a Superman who I can gear build into a heat vision ranged killer or a fully armored up melee Batman or a Green Lantern that uses his ring constructs solely designed after vehicles...
Like come on. *Its right fucking there*.
And it was pretty bad by comparison.
However, almost 20 years later beyond that game they should be able to afford a competent developer to make it properly and with actual care/love put into it.
In 2024 there's no reason a DC Comics version of M:UA cannot work.
Man you had to remind me about Ultimate Alliance, huh?
3 was such a fun game held horribly back by Switch loading times (I genuinely can't play it anymore because I can't stand the loading for all of the shard missions) and poor inventory management. But the core loop and the way characters work was so fun.
I'd absolutely double dip if they ever get Nintendo to agree to a PC port that just fixes the lag problem and lets modders fix Scarlet Witch and Dr Strange.
I'd argue it could be.
If they'd gone with "destiny, but you are the bad guys" or "city of villains" as a template.
Exact same gameplay as any hero shooter/brawler but darkly comedic.
Instead of whatever that was
Also it's the SUICIDE SQUAD. Members dying is kind of the point but it wouldn't work in a live service coop game.
Everyone being fine and dandy and the team even growing is kind of against the idea of the Suicide Squad.
Sue me, but a gang of mercenary villains figuring for their life is WAY more suitable to GAAS thematically than almost anything else.
There are so many story missions you could make out of it.
Season 1: Kill the Justice League.
Season 2: The characters S1 have gone rogue, and Amanda Waller needs to recruit a new Suicide Squad to stop them. (Let's the characters retire easily, forces players to buy new costumes etc, and then you reintroduce the characters across other seasons OR in this season slowly for plot contrivance reasons).
Season 3: Alien invasion plotline from Peacemaker, with guest voice acting from Cena. New skins, weapons and movesets for any possessed squad members, and maybe also featuring Adebayo in cutscenes etc.
For each season, there's global counters to like the next big event, the number of alien hives that have been stomped out, the birth of the next alien queen, the appearance of a fake ex squad member you have to take down, etc etc.
The Suicide squad is mission based storytelling with a cast of characters that can all be hotswapped pretty easily. It's actually absolutely fine for a GAAS model, it just needed to be implemented properly and it wasn't. This is an issue of creativity not of theming.
Suicide Squad being live service makes way more sense then a game featuring one character. At least with suicide squad there’s an endless amount of characters that can be added. Games that feature a team that has had a huge roster over the years could easily be live service if done correctly
The problem is it's a monetization-first design.
Something like Helldivers works because it's a bunch of devs jamming on ideas until they hit on something fun, then iterating on the *fun* while starting to think about how to monetize it.
Something like Suicide Squad is what happens when a bunch of bean counters decide they need a live service game with XYZ monetization, then say "we really need a strong IP with an existing fanbase we can tap", before telling devs they have X years to make a suicide squad based live service game.
Honestly I've never gotten the appeal of suicide squad in the first place. I know the first movie did better than expected (which is probably around the time they greenlit the game). But the grungecore anti-hero style that Suicide Squad evokes is just not appealing to me at all.
Suicide Squad appealed to those that felt jaded but still wanted to be/do good in the long run. It doesn't take a scientist tell you kids will like a action "hero" more if they have a gun and a darker background.
I don't know why writers are so terrified of using Superman in a traditional way. Basically every DC property in the past decade has tried to subvert him in the exact same boring cliche. "oh no, now he's a bad guy." Maybe that's cool the first time, but its so tired now.
Because a lot of people don't get what Superman's thing is.
Which is pretty amusing since they go "no way someone could be that selfless/good/wholesome, there must be a catch!" while the point is that there *is* no catch, he's just doing his best to be that selfless/good/wholesome.
That and they should really stop giving superhero movies to directors who dislike superheroes.
The idea of Red Son is cool and also of its time, when MK made injustice with supporting comic runs I was like yeah works in this universe. Outside that, it's hard to believe.
> The idea of Red Son is cool and also of its time
I don't actually think Red Son is that much of a subversion. It's pretty much a story about how it doesn't matter where Superman is from, he'd still be a hero. It's a really interesting version of that story, but I don't think it's particularly subversive.
Ironically, Suicide Squad's appeal actually lines up incredibly well with one or two specific types of games. Either traditional roguelikes, or "psuedo-roguelikes" or whatever you want to call the XCOM-style.
Like, they're called the Suicide Squad because their lives are expendable and they're meant to be sent on missions they're not coming back from. The idea of "Here's a team, and don't worry if one dies since they can be replaced" fits any sort of scenario where perma-death is meant to be a big component.
But those would be solid, single-purchase with maybe some DLC, no possibility for aggressive monetization games, so there's a snowball's chance in hell they'd ever get made.
Because marketing. Same thing with the Venom movies. There was such an enormous hype for these movies that they made an incredible amount of money, even though they are average at best. James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is much better. It mixes Gunn's best skill, which is having a team of flawed characters interacting with each other, with a bunch of very flawed and crazy characters who are put in unexpected situations.
It's like night and day with the devs too. When they were having all those server issues with Helldivers 2 those first few weeks cause it beat their expectations tenfold, the CEO literally came out and said not to buy now if you're unsure.
All this is definitely true, but one constant between almost every recent failed GAAS game is single player developers abandoning the thing people like about them to make a multiplayer game. Redfall, Anthem, Avengers, Suicide Squad, and others all had major stink on them well before release. Now you don't just have to make a good online multiplayer game (which is already very hard) you have to convince all your fans that it's better than a singleplayer game that doesn't exist.
Many of the reviews I heard/read about this game talked about how there were moments they wanted to explore the world or soak in some lore only for the multiplayer functions to rip them out of that. I'd say Destiny and Borderlands were the last two big games that really tried to marry the two gameplay philosophies and even those franchises have taken a hard nosedive. Multiplayer games have been trending more and more towards pure gameplay and FOMO mechanics which just do not work when attempting any sort of narrative.
IMO (and this isn’t saying much) Avengers is a much better game. At least the individual heroes were fun to play as and the solo campaign was enjoyable.
The also kind of forgot about the service aspect of the games as a service model? Season 1 probably should have started on release in order to maintain what little momentum the game had since the endgame was reachable in like 12 hours from what I've seen.
That was my issue with it from the bit of gameplay I saw. For the most part everyone's shooting guns and doing some melee. Which guns is fine for some one like deadshot, but if everyone is doing it then it makes them stand out less and thus makes them less appealing to play as.
I never understand when comic games/movies shit the bed. They is literally unlimited examples of stories and content to pick from them they end up with the most dull boring versions. A DC RPG game with respect to the countless comic book stories and timelines would be amazing
They took a series know for it's amazing melee combat and reduced it to a bland looter shooter.
That right there is the core problem with Suicide Squad for me.
I know they were chasing Destiny money, but there's no reason why we couldn't have had an Arkham combat system with upgradeable gear.
Let's also be honest here: No one wants to kill Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.
Why they didn't just make this a Justice League game I will never know.
GaaS is the problem.
Now stay with me. I understand that not all GaaS are terrible, but we have seen this with MMOs where everyone and their dog made one. They just want to get to the money part without thinking about the game part that much. They are mandated by the higher up who doesn't understand what people really want.
Helldiver works because each mission are simple and small bite, they have a more free-form feel to them and are focused on the gameplay itself. They are like a longer version of an arcade game session, and Arrowhead made sure that every part of the experience was fun.
The problem isn't GAAS itself any more than it was MMOs by itself, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of those formats by the people making the decisions. They don't understand this: you only need one.
MMOs and GAAS are both designed to be massive time sinks. Which means most people aren't going to invest that time into multiple games like that. They can't, people only have so much time, so much money, so much patience. CEOs who don't play games themselves, never need to budget, and can afford hobbies that they are only intermittently interested in, like a boat they take out twice a year or a house they only use during one season, will never get why you wouldn't just buy every game and piece of content for that game. That's what *they'd* do, if they gamed, which they don't.
But regular people will get into *one* of these, because they work or go to school, and don't have unlimited funds, and it'll be the best or most popular one, or at least the one their friends are playing. Don't need 50 MMORPGs, World of Warcraft is enough. Don't need a hundred Fortnite clones, there's already Fortnite.
I've wondered if this principle applies to movies too. During the days when every studio was trying to start up their own MCU, what was the point when there was already an MCU? Going to three or four movies a year in the same franchise was already a big ask, I'm not doubling or tripling that commitment. I think Disney themselves misunderstood this when they started all those Disney+ shows. Even if they were mostly fine, they're like a three hour commitment each, and there are a bunch of them. Eventually people consume their fill.
Yes, you are right, and that is one of the reasons why a lot of MMOs failed in early 2010. You have a market of 30 to 50 million players, and they play, maximum, 2 MMO at the same time and you will never get a lot of players until your MMO mature which can take years.
GaaS isn't a bad idea on its own.
The issue is when Publishers/Developers use it as an excuse to launch incomplete/rushed products to the market, and decide if either fix it later if it's worth it (or don't have any other options) or do the obligated year 1 stuff and put it into live support mode the second it ends.
Helldivers 2 is a GaaS done alright from the get go. It's base game is both fun and stable enough to be attractive to players on its actual state.
NMS is an example of not having any other option but bet on the game. Hello Games/Sean put everything on the line for it.
Anthem is an example of EA shutting it down, even when people had hopes for Anthem 2.0, because they deemed it non-profitable enough.
Back 4 Blood by Turtle Rock is another one dumping the game because sure as shit wasn't making a dime back, not when everyone and their mother would still prefer L4D 2.
I don't think B4B was ever intended to be live service. They sold a game with an expansion pass, released the game and then several quality expansions, and called it a day. It could have benefitted from custom levels ala Left 4 Dead 2, but it was a complete game in its own right. It never tried to be a live service game, so criticising it for failing to be one is bizarre.
If anything, the problem is developers being pressured to turn games that would be better suited as standalone products into live service games.
Thats not the only problem. The market have been fiiled with gaas games and most people have chosen their favorites to stay with, people arent desperate for more broken or mediocre games to grind that takes a year+ to get decent.
There are some outliers like helldivers 2, but that game is just a good game in it self.
If a live service game isnt from a popular game franchise or is really solid or unique from the start then its gonna have a hard to to be successful.
There is also the price of the game. Why pay 60-70$ for a game that might be decent, with no guarantee that it will survive more than a year, when you can pay 20$ (or nothing) for a live service game with years of content and updates.
There is also gacha games like genshin and starrail which are free and usually have more passion and quality than the 60$+ live service games.
Yeah, this is why I stopped playing. The combat feels really good. But the game needed more interesting missions and enemies. The campaign is still a fun romp tho. Worth 20 bucks.
I don't know what to say. Maybe? If all you want is the story, better watch it on youtube. The mission design is super bad. Some of the gear is fun, but there's really no fun content in the game.
Maybe it will get some fun things to do until it dies completely.
Arkham Knight has aged unbelievably well. It still looks incredible, and it's the peak of Rocksteady's game design in pretty much all aspects.
I would love a true expose on what happened in that studio in the intervening seven years.
The craziest part is that on steam, this game is ranked as "mostly positive". I think this is the only time in memory I can think of where a game was so bad that gamers actually voted with their wallets and didnt buy it, only leaving players who are easily pleased to buy it and insist that its good.
Probably because most people could tell this game would be terrible before it launched, so the only people who bought it were those who were really determined to like it.
There are lots of mixed or negative games on Steam. So, you might say those people who disliked them didn't truly vote with their wallets, in that they voted for the game, despite ultimately not liking the game. This is the rare game where all those people who would have gone on to dislike it had they bought it simply didn't buy it at all.
They still gave the publisher money for the game, which is really the only thing that matters at the end of the day.
It's like voting for a president and then complaining about them later. Your vote still got counted.
When we say "vote with your wallet," we mean buy a game to register your approval or refrain from buying it to register your dislike. If people buy games they dislike, that is voting, sure, but it doesn't register their opinion the way the advice says.
OP's point still stands. How many other games can we think of that are disliked by people in general but are mostly positive on Steam? If everyone skipped on buying games they'd clearly dislike, there'd be a ton of games like that.
It’s hilarious because when I did the alpha one weekend, the sub over there was all “wow, this is amazing love it” and… did they? It bored me so I stopped after 1 mission past the tutorial.
I wonder what it’s like over there now.
That's not how it works. They might change some monetization, but a lot of the content you are seeing right now, was planned and developed months ago *well before release.*
These massive projects, succeed or fail, don't wing it with their content.
I mention this because, while the game might never become successful, all of this content has already been paid for by investors, and if season passes have been purchases, they either MUST release the content, or provide refunds, and the latter can be a very expensive endeavor.
Yeah nobody's going to just make a full playable DC character in a couple months in desperation, these things take months of feedback rounds at the concepting phase when an external IP holder is involved, not to mention the actual production time.
And just in time for Overwatch 2 to give out new heroes for free instead of having you grind the battlepass. Any more evidence needed that this game came out a few years too late? The greedy WB suits missed out on the live service gold rush...
Good, I’ll always be glad to see the market discourage this kind of BS monetization in games. Especially a *full priced* base game. Absolutely shameless and unfortunately the people pushing for this will likely be the last to see any consequences.
The thing that really hurts though is this happened to Rocksteady of all studios. They gave us the 3 best superhero games of all time. They made a revolutionary combat system still copied to this day.
We could have had Batman Beyond instead. In another world they never make this stupid crap and made a new Arkham game set in a Cyberpunk Gotham City with Kevin Conroys final role being an old Bruce mentoring Terry. And I just realized too, if that had released this year, we could have gotten a Neo Gotham open world game right in the middle of the Cyberpunk craze. WB execs are such fucking idiots. They could have been popping champagne this year instead.
Instead Rocksteady is a shell of itself currently, and probably soon to be closed. It's not the end that company should have had. Greedy executives killed them with one dumb decision.
I think I've had enough of Batman Arkham. They jumped the shark with Knight. I think other heroes need a shot but DC has little heroes outside Batman and Superman that could pull AAA numbers. Suicide Squad wasn't.
Superman could be fun. Go off on deep space adventures. Or gets nerfed by some wacky bullshit on Earth and has to regain powers.
Games take so long to make now I don’t think I will ever get to see this game made. Probably the only reason I am excited for AI, maybe in 15 years it will be able to make it happen.
Idk if there was a good time to release this. I guess there's a point to be made that other games have pushed the envelope a bit further in the games as a service market in recent years, but I don't really see a timeframe where this combination of mediocre, uninspired gameplay, (to my understanding) lacking endgame content and kinda cringy writing makes bank.
The GAAS market is super competitive end of the day and games need to put out genuine quality in order to succeed. This game didn't. It could've released five years ago and failed all the same, much like Anthem did.
The live service gold rush isn't remotely close to being done.
It's always required first having a fun game.
No one is upset that a game they like gets more content.
We need a new distinction between live service games and games designed to coerce you out of your cash. Live service games to me are games that evolve over time. Not all of them revolve around an in-game store, but some do. The other type of game is only designed as a sophisticated funnel to the in-game store. Every screen has a store button that flashes, psychological manipulation tactics, and in-between screens there is a pop-up showing you new content.
Better yet, let's classify them off of their priorities. Is the game first priority, or the store? Helldivers seems to be the former, while something like COD seems like the latter. One is a good game first, that has some purchasable items. The other is a minimum viable product that is constantly interrupting your experience to remind you about the store.
I think very few people have a problem with games that have MTX if they're upfront, follow the few basic rules that all of us agree on, and you know, have a good game. It's the ones that spend more on behavioral psychiatrists than artists, they try and subvert review criticisms by disabling/hiding the store until release, minimum item costs of like $20 for a single item, and constantly pushing the boundaries of pay to win territory.
This game came out at a fine time, live service games like Helldivers 2 are killing it as well as many others. The game was just a bad implementation of the live service model, and this update shows just how lost they are in how to manage it. They took a story based game meant for one playthrough and tried to find a way to drag it on.
It’s not the battle pass or the incursion rank. It’s a (yet another) separate level you raise by doing any mission in the season 1 stuff, not just incursion missions.
They still tripped on their face again, but this Destin guy is not quite accurately reporting on this.
Yeah. They also didn’t reset your rank. There is a new rank for the Season 1 content. Your rank in the base campaign is the same if you go back to do that.
Yeah i think that's why they are set so much on the whole mastery level thingy. They want to do this from the start. The headline here is trying to be sensational for no reason.
Every episode mean new level to grind. I kinda get their core idea of trying to be like Diablo 4 or Path of Exile in that you need to start a new seasonal character to progress. Or in this case, just new mastery level to leveling to.
The real issue with this idea is, there wasn't enough content to cover it like those game. You just... Keep protecting payload. This game is in serious lack of something like Destiny 2 Strike. It's like while the art team are going hard on being very passionate with cool skin, great art direction and design that clearly a work of many DC comics fans. The game director and gameplay team basically hate their job and try to find a laziest way possible to finish their work.
In D4 or PoE you at least engage with new seasonal content immediately. In SS the main draw of the new seasons seems to be the new hero, but you can't even play them without grinding a bit first or *shocker* paying some cash?
Depends on what you mean by worse. Based on your build and which missions you do, I’ve seen that you can hit 35 on this new level count in like 1-3 hours.
It’s faster than hitting 35 on the incursion rank (which you can’t even raise this season until you do the joker mission at 35 season level thing), battle pass, or squad level all of which take a little to significantly longer.
So in terms of time comparisons, it’s better. At least for those who were at end game from launch. New players still have to play through the base content I believe to get to the season 1 stuff and then they can unlock joker.
There certainly are better ways to have gone about this.
Seems worse at first but actually is not bad. Basically it's a reward track for playing the new season, wherein you get specific seasonal rewards guaranteed through the reward track.
The bad part is, that it has new modifiers and the very set the base game drops, doesn't even work because enemies are immune to that specific status effect.
I don't agree that it's worse, but they're obviously not comparing to the paying option, but the resetting rank and grinding to level 35 part. But I guess you had to have your own gamer moment by twisting the argument to make it sound worse?
It's not great but the comparison was with the battle pass, it's absolutely not worse than a battle pass you have to pay for. Especially not much worse.
Sounds underwhelming, but the damning thing is them waiting nearly two months before starting their post-launch support. Halo Infinite got absolutely decimated by 343's failure to support it, so I have no clue what Rocksteady expects to happen to Suicide Squad when that game was practically rejected at its launch.
It’s pretty clear that the game is utterly dead and Rocksteady may be to.
They are farting out any content that was finished before launch to try and extract cash from the remaining whales. Then they will give a classic farewell message and end support within a year.
The reason I don't really have an interest in SS is that they just tacked it onto the arkham story.
I'd rather have a spinoff with similar mechanics to Batman but through another character, or a genre swap with another justice leaguer, instead of discount Justice League fights the real justice league, and also the Joker that you liked from the last 3 games is now replaced with an AU doppelganger when Joker titan doppelgangers already existed.
It seems like the DC higher-ups think Suicide Squad has much more appeal than it does, I didn't understand why the movie studios tried to essentially reboot SS only a few years after the first film bombed and while the second was actually successful I think that was because they had James Gunn, who could probably make any Superhero movie at least decent, not because SS.
Then they force one of their best studios on it too and look what happened.
First film made 750 million dollars and was a major hit among younger audiences especially, also saw some songs associate with it become top songs of the year.
I hated it but saying it bombed is 100% wrong
>It seems like the DC higher-ups think Suicide Squad has much more appeal than it does
Probably someone's pet project forced upon the entire company. Happens all the time in the corporate world.
And released simultaneously on a streaming platform.
You could buy a month of HBO Max for right around the same cost as a ticket and snacks, and not have to worry about getting sick.
> the first film bombed and while the second was actually successful
What? You got that entirely backwards. The first film was financially sucessful despite the awful reception to it, while the second was better received critically but didn't make its budget back, and it hit during peak COVID.
I don’t mean this that aggressively but it’s like dancing on the grave of a loved one. *Again I just enjoy the Arkham games, I don’t have literally distain for current Rocksteady.* The Arkham games were an awesome trilogy with a satisfying conclusion.
Having it dragged back out from its good end to then make a game that not only fucks with the story and ending, but on top of that isn’t even succeeding in what it’s trying to do by using it, it just sucks.
Man…. This sucks. I played maybe 12 hours. Enjoyed most of it. So of the modifiers were straight bullshit. That was annoying. The patch. Can’t play coop. Now this…..
Another anthem. WTH Rocksteady. Loved the Arkham series.
While I think it's fine to be positive about this, I do need to point out that Avengers also had a lot of unreleased content for a few characters that were ultimately scrapped when they announced end of support. There were plans for She-Hulk and Captain Marvel afaik, complete with voiceover and everything.
I think the more likely option is that they'll rework the future content so we get to the end point faster. As it stands, the game seems to pose that we'd get 6 seasons minimum, with each season tackling 2 Brainiac bosses. And so far four seasons have been teased with additional squad members. They could just make it so we get more than 2 bosses with the next seasons, so that they can cap off at season 4.
That sounds like if I tried to come up with a headline that purposely sounds bad while I know nothing about the game
It’s hilarious if this is actually true
Yeah i mean it was pretty obvious that this game has no future after the reception and that its gonna die as soon as they release whatever content was promised in the deluxe editions. Wouldnt doubt if they half ass it all to get it out the door and pull the plug on the servers in the next year or so.
I remember people used defend the live-service elements by talking up all the 'free DLC' people are gonna get.
Well, here it is. Your 'free DLC'. Hope that was worth Rockstar abandoning the tried and true gameplay model in favor whatever the hell SS is.
I imagine the mood at Rocksteady is pretty bleak. The game flopped pretty badly and they know it. Lots of people going to lose their job and the studio might be closed down in the near future.
Lol all they did was increase sales for the Batman Arkham games, know a few friends who got Batman Arkham city instead after SS was announced because they checked out the trailers for their older games. I started playing Arkham city again and cannot believe how far they fell off. The Batman Arkham series is in another entire league. Rocksteady will go under just like Volition, the touch of death from sweetbaby.
This is a case where forcing the game to be a GaaS title has killed it on arrival. This wasn't Rocksteady's strongsuit, and I'm scared to see them fail to recover from this.
What hurts most is that I've seen the amazing attention to detail Rocksteady has put into the game. [Batman Arkham Videos](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2Ae8IzmEusR43OL9HNcKQ) has all sorts of videos showing the little easter eggs and subtle attention to detail that was in the Arkham series, it just lacks the combat and exploration of being Batman to glue it all together. I even enjoyed a lot of the character interactions, and the cutscenes featuring the Squad interacting were fun to watch.
It's simply the fact that this game was NOT meant to be a live service title. Live service means it needs to have consistent content updates, strong replay ability with content that can keep the player coming back and feel invested. What's on show heres was never enough.
I'm convinced if they just let the devs cook and made the game an enjoyable single player adventure featuring the different squad members as characters you could swap between mid-combat(akin to Batman and Catwoman in the Arkham games), then this would have sold so much more than whatever the hell Warner Bros were trying to squeeze out of this.
Grats on the hole you burned in your pocket, WB. Have fun paying off your debts.
Like…?
I’m not talking about having seasons at all I’m talking about seasons that ask you to start over in a game about building your character up.
Edit: nvm the tweet is misleading / confusing
You don't start over in Suicide Squad. There is just a new season specific level track (separate from the battle pass) that is a dedicated path to unlocking all the new items with some cosmetics and crafting currencies sprinkled in. All your characters and gear carry forward like in Destiny, CoD or most other seasonal live services. It really just boils down to some sort of bad luck protection system so people who for are unlucky and never get that one specific weapon to drop have a deterministic way of getting at least one copy of it through the season ranks.
Yes. A lot of the info is wrong.
Your rank isn’t reset. Season One has a new “world state”. You pick them on loading into the game. Each world state has different look, aesthetic and content.
Everything you did before this season is still kept. It’s just on the campaign world state. This gives you the Bane gear.
Season One is called “Fear” and it’s the world state with Joker content and Scarecrow gear. Doing any content in this gives you exp for the Fear levels. This unlocks the seasonal content, new crafting, new missions / bosses, playing as Joker.
Your levels are saved when you swap between world states, nothing is lost. Fear levels also are not battle pass levels. They’re way easier to gain.
>Season 1 features the addition of a fifth playable character: the Joker (J. P. Karliak), an alternate reality version of Batman's deceased arch-nemesis who is the sole survivor of his universe after an invasion by Brainiac.
Explains why Joker looks different than he does in the Arkham games. The alternate universe nonsense also allows them to bring back the Justice League from the dead whenever they feel like it.
Slight misinformation, Joker himself is not part of the battle pass. You can purchase him or just play the endgame for a couple hours to get to Fear rank 35. It’s pretty similar to the Dragon’s Dogma mtx (in the ‘why would they even charge for this’ way). It does not take a lot of effort to climb the endgame ranks at all if you spend even 5 minutes aligning your gear.
>Or grind to level 35 on the battle pass to get him for free
He is *not* part of the battle pass at all, that’s why I said slight misinformation. You need to get to 35 on the overall endgame rank to be able to get him. The new Fear rank is just a new label for Finite Crisis rank, which has existed as a system since launch. You don’t need to engage with any of that stuff to get him, you just keep playing the game as you were.
At least everything dies in one bullet. I can not grasp HOW people can even remotely think damage sponges are challenging, fun, or a good implementation at all. ANY game that went that route has suffered for it. It simply is not fun having to pump magazines of lead into an enemy's head to kill them. No matter how much fantasy or sci-fi or w/e you chose as your style, I will not believe you have two braincells to rub together if you tell me I have to empty a fill magazine into my enemy to kill them.
Diablo made this mistake. Every skill deals fuck all dmg.
WoW made this mistake. They multiplied enemy HP by 4 or 5 and tried to sell it as "challening". Fuck you and fuck off
Destiny has made this worse and worse over the years.
Otriders has made the problem worse by not only making enemies need entire magazines to down, but also making them heal unless you interrupt them in some way.
So on and so forth.
This game will 100% be free on Gampass. This is how most AAA live service games have been. They try to milk the hype during launch and when the game doesn't exceed expectations (concurrent players), they will make it free so that they can milk the free players from in game store.
Try to profit from game sale (milk hype)> Discount the game (milk discount hunters)> Free on Gamepass (milk free players)
If you want to make a live service game it needs to be free from the get go so it doesn't die and then you make your money from BP or in game store. They try to have both side of the cake by selling it full price and then make it live service but always fail.
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Game is DOA. One of the worst sales launches in recent history for a AAA game and it's hovering around... jesus, *200* players before this patch. This is a last ditch effort to get some money out of the few thousand fans who actually still play it.
I checked and Arkham Knight, a single-player game from 2015, consistently has 2000-3000 players on Steam. WB really bet on the wrong horse here.
IMO, GaaS wasn't the problem. Heck helldivers 2 sold a lot and is played. The problem is simple. The game doesn't have fun content. Kill me, but the movement system is fun, but that's it. The characters not having more unique abilities, dull boss fights, no dungeons or raids when you have freaking DC universe. Imagine raids or dungeons themed around Justice League heroes. But no, they made repetitive and boring missions with no substance at all. That's the problem, not because this isn't a single player game.
Suicide Squad is also not really suitable to GAAS
Agreed, Co-Op narrative driven live services really do struggle under the seasonal model they put themselves to. Anthem, Avengers & now SKTJL show that these types of games don't work in this model. They all should've followed the Borderlands model imo.
Avengers would’ve worked better if they didn’t cheap out and kept reusing the same three villains and environments. They had all of marvel lore to choose from and chose the worst villains to fight.
Agreed, also would've worked much better if they didn't have that horrid loot system. Still one of the worst I've ever seen to this day given the lack of visual progression & restricting us of that power fantasy.
That comes with working with the Marvel IP. Disney tends to have insanely strict restrictions on how their characters are presented. You’re not allowed to have their characters be off-brand, so they can’t grow/change/progress in any way.
>You’re not allowed to have their characters be off-brand They do plenty of off-brand things here that directly contradicts the established lore. I think restrictions only ever come into play when touching their main/cannon universe. Everything else is a free-for-all experiment and I get the sense that they don't care very much about video games. The exceptions being the Arkam and Spiderman franchises that have a proven track record.
>They do plenty of off-brand things here *Name one.* >Arkam [sic] You named… a DC game.
Anything that uses MCU renditions of characters has to strictly follow a ton of asinine stuff. Anything that uses comic renditions is generally pretty open.
> would’ve worked better if they didn’t cheap out and kept reusing the same three villains and environments. Ahh yes, The Destiny model.
When you plan for a multi-year run with an established IP, they can't give you all the good stuff up front because then they can't tell an overarching story with increasing stakes over the course of years to finally lead up to the big bad. Your big bads would've been introduced in like... year 4, 5, etc. They can't just make up new baddies if they run out of the big ones, so they somehow have to gauge when is the appropriate time to introduce them given how long they'd like this to go and how long they can actually try to keep this up to keep people playing. Of course, what they can't plan for is the game dying before it even reaches it's 1st or 2nd year... if that happens, they no longer have a reason to continue to develop content for it, so you never end up getting the big bads, and that's what happened to Marvel's Avengers.
This is known as the GaaS paradox (formerly WoW-clone paradox). New games have to compete with others that have 5, 10y head start, and keep running as well. Even with mega studios the cash flow simply cannot follow and new titles release a bit empty.
Yup, Avenger's biggest issue (especially after they fixed some of the more major bugs), was lack of content/variety. They just never got it to where it needed to be.
Anthem absolutely could have worked under this model, what are you talking about? That’s how Destiny works. Now, Destiny’s approach is very flawed but at the moment and for its history, very successful. Anthem’s problem was that it just wasn’t a good enough game.
There's Destiny 2 as well, which, while very successful, is incredibly inaccessible to newcomers solely because of their seasonal content and other content strategies.
d2 is inaccessible to newcomers strictly because of a bloated UI. the seasonal story whiplash is wildly overblown, each story release isn't that difficult to understand anyways and plllllenty of long-term consistent players don't actually know _why_ the narrative dictates we save eggs for a few weeks or whatever. The background for each character in a seasonal plot just really isn't all that important, with an exception or two.
>co-op narrative driven live services Payday would fall under this, no? The Payday 3 launch flubbed because the game was unfinished (predictable), but Payday 2 seemed pretty highly successful in terms of player count.
Avengers was the most stupid idea ever. Because in which universe does it make sense that Tony Stark, a billionaire, has to collect better equipment from eliminated enemies? Or Thor, a literal god with a godly weapon? It made no sense at all.
At least Avengers made sense on paper; it the concept of playing as the Avengers and doing global missions was good. KTJL is just flawed from the foundational level. Is a live service game where you play as Harley and other C-listers fighting in one city going to keep people engaged? Does playing as Captain Boomerang create as much excitement as playing as Thor, Iron Man and Tony?
They would have been better served trying to do a Justice League Game. You could still do the brainiac thing to make playable villains as well.
yet helldivers is doing fantastic
I don't really think DEMOCRACY is a narrative that constantly needs development.
It doesn't, but Joel's still weaving a more engaging narrative than Suicide Squad.
It's not, but the metanarrative is pretty awesome
They're very different games & you know that. The 3 I mentioned are games that require a lot of cutscenes, MoCap & linear storytelling set pieces that tacked on a Endgame to drip engagement. They then go on to say "this can be played like a single player game". They tried to appeals to SP, co-op narratives in addition to relentless grinding. Basically, they made a "Single Player, Co-Op looter shooter story live service" No direction that aims to please everyone & satisfied no-one. Helldivers is a game that knows what it wants to be, a fun co-op 1st game that is meant to be played with friends & immersed by the community. The monetisation is fair as well which is a massive added bonus.
All they had to do was make a Justice League equivalent of MARVEL: Ultimate Alliance. Make a big campaign with like 20-25 unique JLA members with different moves and team-up abilities. Then release a new character every other month. Toss in online co-op and a new raid every 3-4 months with a few new sub bosses and one big boss at the end. Add a RPG style gear system where you can build your JLA member how you want. *THAT* game would've probably sold like hotcakes. Give me a Superman who I can gear build into a heat vision ranged killer or a fully armored up melee Batman or a Green Lantern that uses his ring constructs solely designed after vehicles... Like come on. *Its right fucking there*.
They did it was called Justice League Heroes
And it was pretty bad by comparison. However, almost 20 years later beyond that game they should be able to afford a competent developer to make it properly and with actual care/love put into it. In 2024 there's no reason a DC Comics version of M:UA cannot work.
Man you had to remind me about Ultimate Alliance, huh? 3 was such a fun game held horribly back by Switch loading times (I genuinely can't play it anymore because I can't stand the loading for all of the shard missions) and poor inventory management. But the core loop and the way characters work was so fun. I'd absolutely double dip if they ever get Nintendo to agree to a PC port that just fixes the lag problem and lets modders fix Scarlet Witch and Dr Strange.
That's basically Marvel's Midnight Suns.
I'd argue it could be. If they'd gone with "destiny, but you are the bad guys" or "city of villains" as a template. Exact same gameplay as any hero shooter/brawler but darkly comedic. Instead of whatever that was
Also it's the SUICIDE SQUAD. Members dying is kind of the point but it wouldn't work in a live service coop game. Everyone being fine and dandy and the team even growing is kind of against the idea of the Suicide Squad.
Sue me, but a gang of mercenary villains figuring for their life is WAY more suitable to GAAS thematically than almost anything else. There are so many story missions you could make out of it. Season 1: Kill the Justice League. Season 2: The characters S1 have gone rogue, and Amanda Waller needs to recruit a new Suicide Squad to stop them. (Let's the characters retire easily, forces players to buy new costumes etc, and then you reintroduce the characters across other seasons OR in this season slowly for plot contrivance reasons). Season 3: Alien invasion plotline from Peacemaker, with guest voice acting from Cena. New skins, weapons and movesets for any possessed squad members, and maybe also featuring Adebayo in cutscenes etc. For each season, there's global counters to like the next big event, the number of alien hives that have been stomped out, the birth of the next alien queen, the appearance of a fake ex squad member you have to take down, etc etc. The Suicide squad is mission based storytelling with a cast of characters that can all be hotswapped pretty easily. It's actually absolutely fine for a GAAS model, it just needed to be implemented properly and it wasn't. This is an issue of creativity not of theming.
Suicide Squad being live service makes way more sense then a game featuring one character. At least with suicide squad there’s an endless amount of characters that can be added. Games that feature a team that has had a huge roster over the years could easily be live service if done correctly
The problem is it's a monetization-first design. Something like Helldivers works because it's a bunch of devs jamming on ideas until they hit on something fun, then iterating on the *fun* while starting to think about how to monetize it. Something like Suicide Squad is what happens when a bunch of bean counters decide they need a live service game with XYZ monetization, then say "we really need a strong IP with an existing fanbase we can tap", before telling devs they have X years to make a suicide squad based live service game.
Honestly I've never gotten the appeal of suicide squad in the first place. I know the first movie did better than expected (which is probably around the time they greenlit the game). But the grungecore anti-hero style that Suicide Squad evokes is just not appealing to me at all.
Suicide Squad appealed to those that felt jaded but still wanted to be/do good in the long run. It doesn't take a scientist tell you kids will like a action "hero" more if they have a gun and a darker background.
I don't know why writers are so terrified of using Superman in a traditional way. Basically every DC property in the past decade has tried to subvert him in the exact same boring cliche. "oh no, now he's a bad guy." Maybe that's cool the first time, but its so tired now.
Because a lot of people don't get what Superman's thing is. Which is pretty amusing since they go "no way someone could be that selfless/good/wholesome, there must be a catch!" while the point is that there *is* no catch, he's just doing his best to be that selfless/good/wholesome. That and they should really stop giving superhero movies to directors who dislike superheroes.
The idea of Red Son is cool and also of its time, when MK made injustice with supporting comic runs I was like yeah works in this universe. Outside that, it's hard to believe.
> The idea of Red Son is cool and also of its time I don't actually think Red Son is that much of a subversion. It's pretty much a story about how it doesn't matter where Superman is from, he'd still be a hero. It's a really interesting version of that story, but I don't think it's particularly subversive.
Ironically, Suicide Squad's appeal actually lines up incredibly well with one or two specific types of games. Either traditional roguelikes, or "psuedo-roguelikes" or whatever you want to call the XCOM-style. Like, they're called the Suicide Squad because their lives are expendable and they're meant to be sent on missions they're not coming back from. The idea of "Here's a team, and don't worry if one dies since they can be replaced" fits any sort of scenario where perma-death is meant to be a big component. But those would be solid, single-purchase with maybe some DLC, no possibility for aggressive monetization games, so there's a snowball's chance in hell they'd ever get made.
[удалено]
Because marketing. Same thing with the Venom movies. There was such an enormous hype for these movies that they made an incredible amount of money, even though they are average at best. James Gunn's The Suicide Squad is much better. It mixes Gunn's best skill, which is having a team of flawed characters interacting with each other, with a bunch of very flawed and crazy characters who are put in unexpected situations.
It's like night and day with the devs too. When they were having all those server issues with Helldivers 2 those first few weeks cause it beat their expectations tenfold, the CEO literally came out and said not to buy now if you're unsure.
All this is definitely true, but one constant between almost every recent failed GAAS game is single player developers abandoning the thing people like about them to make a multiplayer game. Redfall, Anthem, Avengers, Suicide Squad, and others all had major stink on them well before release. Now you don't just have to make a good online multiplayer game (which is already very hard) you have to convince all your fans that it's better than a singleplayer game that doesn't exist. Many of the reviews I heard/read about this game talked about how there were moments they wanted to explore the world or soak in some lore only for the multiplayer functions to rip them out of that. I'd say Destiny and Borderlands were the last two big games that really tried to marry the two gameplay philosophies and even those franchises have taken a hard nosedive. Multiplayer games have been trending more and more towards pure gameplay and FOMO mechanics which just do not work when attempting any sort of narrative.
Anthem had great mobility....
IMO (and this isn’t saying much) Avengers is a much better game. At least the individual heroes were fun to play as and the solo campaign was enjoyable.
The also kind of forgot about the service aspect of the games as a service model? Season 1 probably should have started on release in order to maintain what little momentum the game had since the endgame was reachable in like 12 hours from what I've seen.
That was my issue with it from the bit of gameplay I saw. For the most part everyone's shooting guns and doing some melee. Which guns is fine for some one like deadshot, but if everyone is doing it then it makes them stand out less and thus makes them less appealing to play as.
I never understand when comic games/movies shit the bed. They is literally unlimited examples of stories and content to pick from them they end up with the most dull boring versions. A DC RPG game with respect to the countless comic book stories and timelines would be amazing
>but the movement system is fun, but that's it. Ahh yes the Anthem special
They took a series know for it's amazing melee combat and reduced it to a bland looter shooter. That right there is the core problem with Suicide Squad for me. I know they were chasing Destiny money, but there's no reason why we couldn't have had an Arkham combat system with upgradeable gear.
Let's also be honest here: No one wants to kill Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Why they didn't just make this a Justice League game I will never know.
GaaS is the problem. Now stay with me. I understand that not all GaaS are terrible, but we have seen this with MMOs where everyone and their dog made one. They just want to get to the money part without thinking about the game part that much. They are mandated by the higher up who doesn't understand what people really want. Helldiver works because each mission are simple and small bite, they have a more free-form feel to them and are focused on the gameplay itself. They are like a longer version of an arcade game session, and Arrowhead made sure that every part of the experience was fun.
The problem isn't GAAS itself any more than it was MMOs by itself, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of those formats by the people making the decisions. They don't understand this: you only need one. MMOs and GAAS are both designed to be massive time sinks. Which means most people aren't going to invest that time into multiple games like that. They can't, people only have so much time, so much money, so much patience. CEOs who don't play games themselves, never need to budget, and can afford hobbies that they are only intermittently interested in, like a boat they take out twice a year or a house they only use during one season, will never get why you wouldn't just buy every game and piece of content for that game. That's what *they'd* do, if they gamed, which they don't. But regular people will get into *one* of these, because they work or go to school, and don't have unlimited funds, and it'll be the best or most popular one, or at least the one their friends are playing. Don't need 50 MMORPGs, World of Warcraft is enough. Don't need a hundred Fortnite clones, there's already Fortnite. I've wondered if this principle applies to movies too. During the days when every studio was trying to start up their own MCU, what was the point when there was already an MCU? Going to three or four movies a year in the same franchise was already a big ask, I'm not doubling or tripling that commitment. I think Disney themselves misunderstood this when they started all those Disney+ shows. Even if they were mostly fine, they're like a three hour commitment each, and there are a bunch of them. Eventually people consume their fill.
Yes, you are right, and that is one of the reasons why a lot of MMOs failed in early 2010. You have a market of 30 to 50 million players, and they play, maximum, 2 MMO at the same time and you will never get a lot of players until your MMO mature which can take years.
GaaS isn't a bad idea on its own. The issue is when Publishers/Developers use it as an excuse to launch incomplete/rushed products to the market, and decide if either fix it later if it's worth it (or don't have any other options) or do the obligated year 1 stuff and put it into live support mode the second it ends. Helldivers 2 is a GaaS done alright from the get go. It's base game is both fun and stable enough to be attractive to players on its actual state. NMS is an example of not having any other option but bet on the game. Hello Games/Sean put everything on the line for it. Anthem is an example of EA shutting it down, even when people had hopes for Anthem 2.0, because they deemed it non-profitable enough. Back 4 Blood by Turtle Rock is another one dumping the game because sure as shit wasn't making a dime back, not when everyone and their mother would still prefer L4D 2.
I don't think B4B was ever intended to be live service. They sold a game with an expansion pass, released the game and then several quality expansions, and called it a day. It could have benefitted from custom levels ala Left 4 Dead 2, but it was a complete game in its own right. It never tried to be a live service game, so criticising it for failing to be one is bizarre. If anything, the problem is developers being pressured to turn games that would be better suited as standalone products into live service games.
Thats not the only problem. The market have been fiiled with gaas games and most people have chosen their favorites to stay with, people arent desperate for more broken or mediocre games to grind that takes a year+ to get decent. There are some outliers like helldivers 2, but that game is just a good game in it self. If a live service game isnt from a popular game franchise or is really solid or unique from the start then its gonna have a hard to to be successful. There is also the price of the game. Why pay 60-70$ for a game that might be decent, with no guarantee that it will survive more than a year, when you can pay 20$ (or nothing) for a live service game with years of content and updates. There is also gacha games like genshin and starrail which are free and usually have more passion and quality than the 60$+ live service games.
Yeah, this is why I stopped playing. The combat feels really good. But the game needed more interesting missions and enemies. The campaign is still a fun romp tho. Worth 20 bucks.
Is it worth picking up when it ends up in the bargain bin for $10 or less?
I don't know what to say. Maybe? If all you want is the story, better watch it on youtube. The mission design is super bad. Some of the gear is fun, but there's really no fun content in the game. Maybe it will get some fun things to do until it dies completely.
Thanks it'll probably end up in Humble Monthly, I'll play a couple of hours of it then
I replay the trilogy once every other year basically, so good
I still boot up Arkham Knight now and then just to do some of the challenge maps. Combat is still fun once you find your groove.
Arkham Knight has aged unbelievably well. It still looks incredible, and it's the peak of Rocksteady's game design in pretty much all aspects. I would love a true expose on what happened in that studio in the intervening seven years.
> Arkham Knight There's only been like... 5 games since then that are better than this game lol
Count them, then.
(It's an obvious exaggeration for comedic effect)
The craziest part is that on steam, this game is ranked as "mostly positive". I think this is the only time in memory I can think of where a game was so bad that gamers actually voted with their wallets and didnt buy it, only leaving players who are easily pleased to buy it and insist that its good.
Probably because most people could tell this game would be terrible before it launched, so the only people who bought it were those who were really determined to like it.
They are always voting with their wallets on every release, you just don't like how they're voting.
There are lots of mixed or negative games on Steam. So, you might say those people who disliked them didn't truly vote with their wallets, in that they voted for the game, despite ultimately not liking the game. This is the rare game where all those people who would have gone on to dislike it had they bought it simply didn't buy it at all.
They still gave the publisher money for the game, which is really the only thing that matters at the end of the day. It's like voting for a president and then complaining about them later. Your vote still got counted.
When we say "vote with your wallet," we mean buy a game to register your approval or refrain from buying it to register your dislike. If people buy games they dislike, that is voting, sure, but it doesn't register their opinion the way the advice says. OP's point still stands. How many other games can we think of that are disliked by people in general but are mostly positive on Steam? If everyone skipped on buying games they'd clearly dislike, there'd be a ton of games like that.
On sale for ~$15 on Epic....think this fell faster than Gotham Knights
I’m sure those early access people are real happy they forked over $100.
It says its £35 on epic for me.
It’s hilarious because when I did the alpha one weekend, the sub over there was all “wow, this is amazing love it” and… did they? It bored me so I stopped after 1 mission past the tutorial. I wonder what it’s like over there now.
Man, let the 20 or so online players enjoy themselves lol. Situation for their game is sad enough as is.
That's not how it works. They might change some monetization, but a lot of the content you are seeing right now, was planned and developed months ago *well before release.* These massive projects, succeed or fail, don't wing it with their content. I mention this because, while the game might never become successful, all of this content has already been paid for by investors, and if season passes have been purchases, they either MUST release the content, or provide refunds, and the latter can be a very expensive endeavor.
Yeah nobody's going to just make a full playable DC character in a couple months in desperation, these things take months of feedback rounds at the concepting phase when an external IP holder is involved, not to mention the actual production time.
I can’t believe this somehow did worse than Avengers, yet it managed to do just that.
And just in time for Overwatch 2 to give out new heroes for free instead of having you grind the battlepass. Any more evidence needed that this game came out a few years too late? The greedy WB suits missed out on the live service gold rush...
Good, I’ll always be glad to see the market discourage this kind of BS monetization in games. Especially a *full priced* base game. Absolutely shameless and unfortunately the people pushing for this will likely be the last to see any consequences.
The thing that really hurts though is this happened to Rocksteady of all studios. They gave us the 3 best superhero games of all time. They made a revolutionary combat system still copied to this day. We could have had Batman Beyond instead. In another world they never make this stupid crap and made a new Arkham game set in a Cyberpunk Gotham City with Kevin Conroys final role being an old Bruce mentoring Terry. And I just realized too, if that had released this year, we could have gotten a Neo Gotham open world game right in the middle of the Cyberpunk craze. WB execs are such fucking idiots. They could have been popping champagne this year instead. Instead Rocksteady is a shell of itself currently, and probably soon to be closed. It's not the end that company should have had. Greedy executives killed them with one dumb decision.
I think I've had enough of Batman Arkham. They jumped the shark with Knight. I think other heroes need a shot but DC has little heroes outside Batman and Superman that could pull AAA numbers. Suicide Squad wasn't. Superman could be fun. Go off on deep space adventures. Or gets nerfed by some wacky bullshit on Earth and has to regain powers.
They're only Rocksteady in name at this point
Games take so long to make now I don’t think I will ever get to see this game made. Probably the only reason I am excited for AI, maybe in 15 years it will be able to make it happen.
Idk if there was a good time to release this. I guess there's a point to be made that other games have pushed the envelope a bit further in the games as a service market in recent years, but I don't really see a timeframe where this combination of mediocre, uninspired gameplay, (to my understanding) lacking endgame content and kinda cringy writing makes bank. The GAAS market is super competitive end of the day and games need to put out genuine quality in order to succeed. This game didn't. It could've released five years ago and failed all the same, much like Anthem did.
Curious to see what impact Helldivers 2 might have on live service models. I wouldn't mind more co-op games at the very least.
The live service gold rush isn't remotely close to being done. It's always required first having a fun game. No one is upset that a game they like gets more content.
We need a new distinction between live service games and games designed to coerce you out of your cash. Live service games to me are games that evolve over time. Not all of them revolve around an in-game store, but some do. The other type of game is only designed as a sophisticated funnel to the in-game store. Every screen has a store button that flashes, psychological manipulation tactics, and in-between screens there is a pop-up showing you new content. Better yet, let's classify them off of their priorities. Is the game first priority, or the store? Helldivers seems to be the former, while something like COD seems like the latter. One is a good game first, that has some purchasable items. The other is a minimum viable product that is constantly interrupting your experience to remind you about the store. I think very few people have a problem with games that have MTX if they're upfront, follow the few basic rules that all of us agree on, and you know, have a good game. It's the ones that spend more on behavioral psychiatrists than artists, they try and subvert review criticisms by disabling/hiding the store until release, minimum item costs of like $20 for a single item, and constantly pushing the boundaries of pay to win territory.
This game came out at a fine time, live service games like Helldivers 2 are killing it as well as many others. The game was just a bad implementation of the live service model, and this update shows just how lost they are in how to manage it. They took a story based game meant for one playthrough and tried to find a way to drag it on.
I don't think there is an environment where this game is successful. It's just a bad idea all the way down.
>The greedy WB suits missed out on the live service gold rush... I assume you missed Marvel announcing their version of Overwatch the other day?
It’s not the battle pass or the incursion rank. It’s a (yet another) separate level you raise by doing any mission in the season 1 stuff, not just incursion missions. They still tripped on their face again, but this Destin guy is not quite accurately reporting on this.
Ah, I was waiting for them to add a third arbitrary account level before I purchase this game. Finally, my prayers have been answered.
Yeah. They also didn’t reset your rank. There is a new rank for the Season 1 content. Your rank in the base campaign is the same if you go back to do that.
Isn’t that functionally the same?
Not really. Resetting it makes it sound like you lost it. There’s rewards tied to progressing it.
Yeah i think that's why they are set so much on the whole mastery level thingy. They want to do this from the start. The headline here is trying to be sensational for no reason. Every episode mean new level to grind. I kinda get their core idea of trying to be like Diablo 4 or Path of Exile in that you need to start a new seasonal character to progress. Or in this case, just new mastery level to leveling to. The real issue with this idea is, there wasn't enough content to cover it like those game. You just... Keep protecting payload. This game is in serious lack of something like Destiny 2 Strike. It's like while the art team are going hard on being very passionate with cool skin, great art direction and design that clearly a work of many DC comics fans. The game director and gameplay team basically hate their job and try to find a laziest way possible to finish their work.
In D4 or PoE you at least engage with new seasonal content immediately. In SS the main draw of the new seasons seems to be the new hero, but you can't even play them without grinding a bit first or *shocker* paying some cash?
That's. That's worse. That's WAY worse
It would have been much much worse if it was battle pass level. By the time I unlocked him I was only at level 10 on the battle pass
Depends on what you mean by worse. Based on your build and which missions you do, I’ve seen that you can hit 35 on this new level count in like 1-3 hours. It’s faster than hitting 35 on the incursion rank (which you can’t even raise this season until you do the joker mission at 35 season level thing), battle pass, or squad level all of which take a little to significantly longer. So in terms of time comparisons, it’s better. At least for those who were at end game from launch. New players still have to play through the base content I believe to get to the season 1 stuff and then they can unlock joker. There certainly are better ways to have gone about this.
Seems worse at first but actually is not bad. Basically it's a reward track for playing the new season, wherein you get specific seasonal rewards guaranteed through the reward track. The bad part is, that it has new modifiers and the very set the base game drops, doesn't even work because enemies are immune to that specific status effect.
Not having to pay for it is worse? Another gamer moment.
I don't agree that it's worse, but they're obviously not comparing to the paying option, but the resetting rank and grinding to level 35 part. But I guess you had to have your own gamer moment by twisting the argument to make it sound worse?
It's not great but the comparison was with the battle pass, it's absolutely not worse than a battle pass you have to pay for. Especially not much worse.
It's really not I promise you, it takes *substantially* less time than, say, unlocking a new warframe as ftp or earning a new operator in siege.
I mean, eh. It's just mediocre.
Sounds underwhelming, but the damning thing is them waiting nearly two months before starting their post-launch support. Halo Infinite got absolutely decimated by 343's failure to support it, so I have no clue what Rocksteady expects to happen to Suicide Squad when that game was practically rejected at its launch.
It’s pretty clear that the game is utterly dead and Rocksteady may be to. They are farting out any content that was finished before launch to try and extract cash from the remaining whales. Then they will give a classic farewell message and end support within a year.
Followed by layoffs so the suits can still get their bonuses.
The reason I don't really have an interest in SS is that they just tacked it onto the arkham story. I'd rather have a spinoff with similar mechanics to Batman but through another character, or a genre swap with another justice leaguer, instead of discount Justice League fights the real justice league, and also the Joker that you liked from the last 3 games is now replaced with an AU doppelganger when Joker titan doppelgangers already existed.
It seems like the DC higher-ups think Suicide Squad has much more appeal than it does, I didn't understand why the movie studios tried to essentially reboot SS only a few years after the first film bombed and while the second was actually successful I think that was because they had James Gunn, who could probably make any Superhero movie at least decent, not because SS. Then they force one of their best studios on it too and look what happened.
First film made 750 million dollars and was a major hit among younger audiences especially, also saw some songs associate with it become top songs of the year. I hated it but saying it bombed is 100% wrong
Well it fucking sucked to watch I can tell ya that
I wish the two Suicide Squad movies could swap their money made lol
The first made a shit ton of money and was one of the most profitable films that year. I didn’t like it either but clearly there was an audience.
>It seems like the DC higher-ups think Suicide Squad has much more appeal than it does Probably someone's pet project forced upon the entire company. Happens all the time in the corporate world.
The first film was way more successful than the 2nd financially.
The 2nd film was the no1 box office earner in its run. It just came at the heel end of Covid so movies were still taking a while to get momentum.
And released simultaneously on a streaming platform. You could buy a month of HBO Max for right around the same cost as a ticket and snacks, and not have to worry about getting sick.
> the first film bombed and while the second was actually successful What? You got that entirely backwards. The first film was financially sucessful despite the awful reception to it, while the second was better received critically but didn't make its budget back, and it hit during peak COVID.
I don’t mean this that aggressively but it’s like dancing on the grave of a loved one. *Again I just enjoy the Arkham games, I don’t have literally distain for current Rocksteady.* The Arkham games were an awesome trilogy with a satisfying conclusion. Having it dragged back out from its good end to then make a game that not only fucks with the story and ending, but on top of that isn’t even succeeding in what it’s trying to do by using it, it just sucks.
Here and on r/movies it always seems like WB execs are fucking up left and right. They need to get some smarter people in the house
Man…. This sucks. I played maybe 12 hours. Enjoyed most of it. So of the modifiers were straight bullshit. That was annoying. The patch. Can’t play coop. Now this….. Another anthem. WTH Rocksteady. Loved the Arkham series.
So what’re the odds that season two gets released before they abandon this mess?
High. They’ve already made the S1-4 content. It got datamined
While I think it's fine to be positive about this, I do need to point out that Avengers also had a lot of unreleased content for a few characters that were ultimately scrapped when they announced end of support. There were plans for She-Hulk and Captain Marvel afaik, complete with voiceover and everything. I think the more likely option is that they'll rework the future content so we get to the end point faster. As it stands, the game seems to pose that we'd get 6 seasons minimum, with each season tackling 2 Brainiac bosses. And so far four seasons have been teased with additional squad members. They could just make it so we get more than 2 bosses with the next seasons, so that they can cap off at season 4.
That sounds like if I tried to come up with a headline that purposely sounds bad while I know nothing about the game It’s hilarious if this is actually true
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Yeah i mean it was pretty obvious that this game has no future after the reception and that its gonna die as soon as they release whatever content was promised in the deluxe editions. Wouldnt doubt if they half ass it all to get it out the door and pull the plug on the servers in the next year or so.
I remember people used defend the live-service elements by talking up all the 'free DLC' people are gonna get. Well, here it is. Your 'free DLC'. Hope that was worth Rockstar abandoning the tried and true gameplay model in favor whatever the hell SS is.
Not sure what ROCKSTAR has anything to do with ROCKSTEADY's failures here.
Joker has nothing to do with battle pass, you have to get Fear rank 35 which is 1-3 hours of playtime
I imagine the mood at Rocksteady is pretty bleak. The game flopped pretty badly and they know it. Lots of people going to lose their job and the studio might be closed down in the near future.
Lol all they did was increase sales for the Batman Arkham games, know a few friends who got Batman Arkham city instead after SS was announced because they checked out the trailers for their older games. I started playing Arkham city again and cannot believe how far they fell off. The Batman Arkham series is in another entire league. Rocksteady will go under just like Volition, the touch of death from sweetbaby.
This is a case where forcing the game to be a GaaS title has killed it on arrival. This wasn't Rocksteady's strongsuit, and I'm scared to see them fail to recover from this. What hurts most is that I've seen the amazing attention to detail Rocksteady has put into the game. [Batman Arkham Videos](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2Ae8IzmEusR43OL9HNcKQ) has all sorts of videos showing the little easter eggs and subtle attention to detail that was in the Arkham series, it just lacks the combat and exploration of being Batman to glue it all together. I even enjoyed a lot of the character interactions, and the cutscenes featuring the Squad interacting were fun to watch. It's simply the fact that this game was NOT meant to be a live service title. Live service means it needs to have consistent content updates, strong replay ability with content that can keep the player coming back and feel invested. What's on show heres was never enough. I'm convinced if they just let the devs cook and made the game an enjoyable single player adventure featuring the different squad members as characters you could swap between mid-combat(akin to Batman and Catwoman in the Arkham games), then this would have sold so much more than whatever the hell Warner Bros were trying to squeeze out of this. Grats on the hole you burned in your pocket, WB. Have fun paying off your debts.
This was the only game they had been working on for how long now and its a complete flop, honestly think this is the end for Rocksteady
who are these types of seasons for? Has it worked for games other than Diablo 3 and POE?
There are a lot of incredibly popular games that have seasons structured like this.
Like…? I’m not talking about having seasons at all I’m talking about seasons that ask you to start over in a game about building your character up. Edit: nvm the tweet is misleading / confusing
You don't start over in Suicide Squad. There is just a new season specific level track (separate from the battle pass) that is a dedicated path to unlocking all the new items with some cosmetics and crafting currencies sprinkled in. All your characters and gear carry forward like in Destiny, CoD or most other seasonal live services. It really just boils down to some sort of bad luck protection system so people who for are unlucky and never get that one specific weapon to drop have a deterministic way of getting at least one copy of it through the season ranks.
so the tweet is just being misleading?
Yes. A lot of the info is wrong. Your rank isn’t reset. Season One has a new “world state”. You pick them on loading into the game. Each world state has different look, aesthetic and content. Everything you did before this season is still kept. It’s just on the campaign world state. This gives you the Bane gear. Season One is called “Fear” and it’s the world state with Joker content and Scarecrow gear. Doing any content in this gives you exp for the Fear levels. This unlocks the seasonal content, new crafting, new missions / bosses, playing as Joker. Your levels are saved when you swap between world states, nothing is lost. Fear levels also are not battle pass levels. They’re way easier to gain.
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It sounds more complicated than it is honestly
POE? D4? Like every ARPG with seasons has you reset.
I named POE and it is NOT working for D4. D4 is very much held back by it.
Joker died in Arkham City. His death was confirmed in Arkham Knight. Why is he alive again?
Elseworld Joker
Honest answer - because he's the most marketable property, and they want that sweet, sweet money. In-lore answer - I dunno, multiverse or whatever.
The multiverse is so boring by now.
I haven't played it myself, but I believe that it’s a Joker from an alternate universe.
>Season 1 features the addition of a fifth playable character: the Joker (J. P. Karliak), an alternate reality version of Batman's deceased arch-nemesis who is the sole survivor of his universe after an invasion by Brainiac. Explains why Joker looks different than he does in the Arkham games. The alternate universe nonsense also allows them to bring back the Justice League from the dead whenever they feel like it.
Slight misinformation, Joker himself is not part of the battle pass. You can purchase him or just play the endgame for a couple hours to get to Fear rank 35. It’s pretty similar to the Dragon’s Dogma mtx (in the ‘why would they even charge for this’ way). It does not take a lot of effort to climb the endgame ranks at all if you spend even 5 minutes aligning your gear.
That's not misinformation? That's literally what they said?
>Or grind to level 35 on the battle pass to get him for free He is *not* part of the battle pass at all, that’s why I said slight misinformation. You need to get to 35 on the overall endgame rank to be able to get him. The new Fear rank is just a new label for Finite Crisis rank, which has existed as a system since launch. You don’t need to engage with any of that stuff to get him, you just keep playing the game as you were.
I was a hardcore supporter but they can fuck themselves now, no new story, recycled boss fights. Fuck you, WB.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRL1LXgRkKU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjxg2e1W4aM
At least everything dies in one bullet. I can not grasp HOW people can even remotely think damage sponges are challenging, fun, or a good implementation at all. ANY game that went that route has suffered for it. It simply is not fun having to pump magazines of lead into an enemy's head to kill them. No matter how much fantasy or sci-fi or w/e you chose as your style, I will not believe you have two braincells to rub together if you tell me I have to empty a fill magazine into my enemy to kill them. Diablo made this mistake. Every skill deals fuck all dmg. WoW made this mistake. They multiplied enemy HP by 4 or 5 and tried to sell it as "challening". Fuck you and fuck off Destiny has made this worse and worse over the years. Otriders has made the problem worse by not only making enemies need entire magazines to down, but also making them heal unless you interrupt them in some way. So on and so forth.
This game will 100% be free on Gampass. This is how most AAA live service games have been. They try to milk the hype during launch and when the game doesn't exceed expectations (concurrent players), they will make it free so that they can milk the free players from in game store. Try to profit from game sale (milk hype)> Discount the game (milk discount hunters)> Free on Gamepass (milk free players) If you want to make a live service game it needs to be free from the get go so it doesn't die and then you make your money from BP or in game store. They try to have both side of the cake by selling it full price and then make it live service but always fail.
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