Anyone who played Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League could probably guess that something went terribly wrong during development. Bloomberg now reports that the multiplayer bomb from a studio beloved for its single-player Batman: Arkham games was plagued by several issues leading up to its repeatedly delayed launch.
According to Bloomberg, there wasn’t a single cause of Suicide Squad’s failure. Instead, the Rocksteady Studios project was hurt by an unclear and shifting creative vision, an ill-fated pivot to a completely new genre, and the “perfectionism” of former creative director Sefton Hill, who left the team prior to release to head up a brand new studio that’s reportedly working on a blockbuster for Microsoft.
Staff told Bloomberg that Hill often created a bottleneck during development, with people waiting a week or longer for him to sign off on individual elements of the open-world shooter. At one point he apparently had the idea to introduce an in-depth vehicle customization aspect to the game, balked at by others on the team since it would seemingly undermine Suicide Squad’s emphasis on its anti-heroes’ own individual traversal abilities. The game does still have (very bad) vehicle missions in it, which might be a remnant of that earlier vision.
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It is amazing how out of touch someone can be with reality.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Most of the execs never tried their hands on a game including this one. They genuinely have no idea about the industry and thought they had a hit game on their hands based on a trailer or something. It‘s truly baffling yet so typical.
krashmo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
MBAs have no useful skills and yet they run every company in existence.
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
That’s WB in a nutshell.
They just put out a Smash Bros competitor with a ton of characters, voice acting, looked like it had a lot of promise.
…and it’s free-to-play. Which means it’s loaded with microtransactions.
Imagine being one of those guys who puts in all of this effort for a game that is doomed to fail.
Carighan@lemmy.world 4 months ago
And the worst is, the C-suites get to fuck shit up, reap massive bonuses, and never suffer any con-S-quences when inevitable their way of running the company causes shit like this to happen.
LifeOfChance@lemmy.world 4 months ago
What reality though? Companies are trying now more than ever to release the shittest cheapest games they can for massive gains. We see more and more trash making insane money. The reality is the average person will play a shitty game for something to do especially if it’s within their interests. In this case it just happened to fail so WB will fire a bunch of people and try something again. It’s a learning experience in the sense that they know they gotta raise the bar for the next release but it won’t be anything substantial.