Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League is a live service game. That sentence alone is enough to drive many fans away because players are fed up with the “games as a service” model. For those who don’t know, a live service game is one built on the promise of continuously releasing new content, usually sold at gradual prices. Whether that content is purely cosmetic, in-game items such as weapons, or even brand new story content, the bottom line is the same. It’s all about raking in money and holding the player’s retention for as long as possible. The graveyard of live service games is growing, and it might need to make some room, as Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League’s design encapsulates everything wrong with this model.
Suicide Squad has had a dark cloud hanging over it for years. Rocksteady’s co-founders and studio heads Sefton Hill and Jaime Walker left the studio during the game’s development in 2022 and formed a new studio in London, Hundred Star Games. That’s an auspicious sign for any game, especially one from a studio with such a good reputation among players. During Sony’s February 2023 State of Play, gameplay of Suicide Squad was revealed to the public with a negative reception. Criticism mainly surrounded how the game doesn’t possess much identity besides playing as DC characters. Even then, there is Deadshot who is a proficient marksman, and then King Shark who is also now a proficient marksman. There is also the inclusion of a gear system similar to Destiny, a battle pass, and an in-game store, all the markings of yet another game as a service. There is no definitive answer for why Rocksteady, masters at crafting single-player experiences like the Arkham games, decided to create a multiplayer based looter shooter. Then the game was delayed by nine months, with its original May 2023 release date slipping to this week. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Scherier, the delay had nothing to do with the reception to the State of Play but rather for general polish. The game we saw was the game we were getting. Now that it’s out, it’s clear that Suicide Squad has undergone zero changes to the formula that players were worried about.
Suicide Squad requires an internet connection just to access the game, with no local co-op or offline single-player mode. (Rocksteady says an offline story campaign will be added later in 2024.). Players who spent $100 on the Deluxe Edition were given three days of early access to play before the official release date. However, during the first day of early access there was a bug that would auto-complete the story. To fix the bug, Rocksteady had to shut down the game’s servers for half the day—meaning every person that spent $100 could not even play the game they spent the extra $30 for early access on. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game wasn’t reliant on a connection to provide “service.” To compensate, Rocksteady gave all players 2000 LuthorCoins, the game’s premium currency. While the coins are good to net a skin or two from the store, this is only the tip of the iceberg for the problem that is Suicide Squad.
What makes Suicide Squad problematic more than anything is its story. Not necessarily what the story is, but how it’s structured. There will be no detailed spoilers here out of courtesy for those that have genuine interest in the narrative, but I will have to mention a key aspect of the plot to make a point so consider this a minor spoiler warning.
Basically, Brainiac is in control of everything that is currently wrong with Metropolis. It isn’t jut one Brainiac though, there are 13 in total. The entire narrative serves solely as a tutorial for the game’s mechanics to sell the player on the endgame of mindlessly grinding away at all the various Brainiacs. This is why the game is structured as a looter shooter, so that you have new gear to go after when each subsequent season launches with more things to obtain. However, what this does is nullify the story players spent their time going through in order to get to this point. The story’s momentum halts just to tell the player that everything they just did was for nothing as this story does not have an ending, only the endgame.
This leads to the problem all live service games face, that being the fact there really is no service. Suicide Squad could have been a nice complete package, but it suffers from the concept of removing content and promoting it as DLC. This is similar to Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth locking away New Game Plus behind a $15 paywall, a normal feature stripped away for the sake of throwing a price tag on it. Unfortunately, this has become a common practice in the industry over the last few years, and it is becoming tiresome. Also games as a service are volatile and often completely disappear, with no attempt at preserving them or making them playable in any format. Games have withered away simply because they aren’t turning over enough profit to warrant keeping the servers up. At the moment Suicide Squad cannot be played offline, which means if Rocksteady pulls the plug on its servers it cannot be played at all, just like its first day of early access.
Live service does not have to be such a bad thing. There can be a sense of synergy with the developers and the community where the game can embody the player’s feedback to provide a much more fulfilling experience. Take Halo 3, which would reward players with cosmetic items for reaching a certain milestone such as collecting all 49 original achievements. Since Halo 3 was a complete package that provided everything Halo fans wanted, with a conclusion to the story and plenty of multiplayer modes to get lost in, players were more than happy to put in the time since it felt rightfully earned. That level of passion is why Halo 3’s servers on the Xbox 360 survived for many years, from 2007 to 2022. Nowadays, those rewards are instead pushed over to in-game stores. There is simply no feeling of progression, as it all comes down to pulling out a credit card. This makes most live service games feel less like a game and more like a chore. The shifting focus to prioritize microtransactions can lead a game down a path where you cannot earn power in any way, and just have to pay for it. Given the nature of the seasonal format, it can generate a feeling of punishment for not playing the game every single day and missing out on the coolest loot. Suicide Squad is the latest example for why this is just a tiring formula.
Rocksteady says you can unlock and access all seasonal content for free through playing the game. But if a game doesn’t have the passion to finish its own story at first, why should you?
Matthew Reyes is an intern at Paste.