What is Going On with Suicide Squad, or, Kill Your Preconceived Notions
Suicide Squad is a game defined by a fan reaction to a buzzword before it actually released.
Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League was barely on my radar before its release. I had heard about a "live service" game with the screen, but hadn't realized the game would be coming out when it did until it swept through my twitter timeline like a freight train laden with expectation. The game became a joke before anyone had played it, and I was more than happy to bask in its status as an easy punchline. That status wasn't entirely unwarranted.
Before its release, many prominent game outlets didn't receive review copies of the game, and many who did had technical issues like performance drops, bugs, and server issues. That review copies weren't widespread isn't, in and of itself, a bad sign, but does read as the publisher suspecting that the press won't cover the game favorably. It's not entirely uncommon that a publisher withholds prerelease copies of a game though; Bethesda famously continues to maintain a grudge against Kotaku.com, "blacklisting" them for leaking early details of Fallout 4, and Bethesda didn't give early copies of Starfield, to Eurogamer, Edge, The Guardian, and obviously Kotaku. Regardless of how you feel about such games or reviewers, cherry picking your critics doesn't inspire confidence.
Coming back to Suicide Squad, it's just the latest time WB Games denied specific reviewers early access to their latest flagship title. Last year, Hogwarts Legacy review copies were spread so that specific outlets got a lot less time with the game before its release, leading to an initial outpouring of praise for the game, that future, more nuanced, and more complete reviews didn't overwrite in the popular consciousness, or review aggregators of the world. That strategy seemed to favor WB Games then, but Suicide Squad has continued to "fall short of WB Games' expectations" in terms of sales since its early February release.
I wouldn't attribute Suicide Squad's financial disappointment to delayed or negative reviews, though. Inarguably, February turned out to be a bad time to release a 4-player co-op shooter that wasn't Helldivers 2, a meteoric success that has broken out into the mainstream, and one that is being sold at nearly half the price. In fact, its nearly impossible not to compare the two, as they are both promising to be living, "live service" games that will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future. "Live service" became the flashpoint term that defined Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but its far from the original point of grievance audiences have with the concept. Games provided over time as a service — rather than at a single point of purchase like a product — is a symptom of rising development and maintenance costs, and its a choice the market has borne for a long time. Since World of Warcraft's nearly mainstream success and domination of the MMO market, gamers have accepted paying over time for their software, rather than upfront.
Subscription models aren't the only way to monetize a Game as a Service (GaaS.) Team Fortress 2 defined what GaaS would look like for the next 15 years, when they announced unlockable weapons and cosmetics as rewards for completing achievements. Valve followed that up with loot boxes, and turned to a free-to-play format. Destiny 2 combines battle passes and yearly expansions into one big charge a year, so players can drop $100 and see everything the game has to offer for the rest of the year, while weekly and monthly updates drive long term engagement, a model known as the lifestyle game.
The important differences between these systems is how coercive the monetization tactics are, what kind of content is paywalled off, and how often elements of the game change or disappear. Spoiler Alert: Suicide Squad isn’t offensive in any of these areas. Some games' content (and the opportunity to unlock it) is promised to persist forever, such as in Halo: Infinite or in Helldivers 2, while Forza Horizon 5 has exclusive cars that can only be unlocked the month of their release. Some games, like Fortnite, allow players to "earn" premium currency, making it possible to unlock otherwise paywalled content by playing an extreme amount.
As of writing, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has only cosmetic microtransactions, extra outfits and emotes that change the look of the playable cast, and a deluxe edition of the game that costs $99.99 compared to the base game's $69.99. The deluxe edition comes with superhero themed outfits for the titular squad, weapons that are notorious rarity, and a battle pass token, redeemable for one of four currently planned premium battle passes. Importantly, those battle passes aren't purchasable yet, but still loom large over the game, especially to people who haven't played it for themselves yet.
I bought Suicide Squad off of the notion I'd heard that Rocksteady Studios made the game they had wanted to follow up their Arkham Trilogy with, without serious compromise or publisher meddling. After that, I was impressed with the unique mobility options available to each character, and the quality and production value of the main casts' performances, so I bought it to give Rocksteady the benefit of the doubt. I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised.
Suicide Squad is charming, genuinely hilarious, and extremely satisfying in its gameplay loop. Even the dreaded inventory screen with its small integer increases in poison damage against grunt enemies errs on the side of Diablo, where many of the stats don't matter until you really drill down on trying for a perfect, airtight build. Indeed, Suicide Squad's RPG mechanics surpass the best of the Borderlands games, which were hugely successful and popular with critics and consumers. Really, when I got my own hands on Suicide Squad, I couldn't understand where any of the bad parts of the game I'd heard about were. I waited in vain for the other shoe to drop for 20 hours. Even now, having killed the Justice League, the game reveals the multiversal story explanation for why there is any more game to play at all, I couldn't help but be wowed by how clever the set up even was.
Suicide Squad isn't the first time gamers lost their minds over a game they hadn't played because of a buzzword they didn't understand. While that interpretation is paternalistic, I think its warranted. I personally liked Suicide Squad, and I don't mean to discount the people who didn't. Instead I want to point out that no one, in person or online, has to value your opinion about anything.
As a game-liker myself, I have no interest in wasting my time with the shouted drivel of people who are speaking to an experience they didn't have, because it didn't include something they think they don't like. Suicide Squad isn't a Batman: Arkham game, even if it exists in the same canon. You can be sad that that franchise is over, but Rocksteady Studios made hundreds of hours of game for you in that series already, and I thought it had gotten stale before Arkham Knight came out. You can legitimately complain that the game has technical issues, or that it always requires an internet connection, but none of those things came up in the discourse beforehand.
Instead, I heard complaints that it was another game poisoned by the scourge of battle passes, even though Suicide Squad promises its battle passes will be cosmetic only, and that the new gameplay features included with the first season will be completely free: a new playable character, new boss fights, new areas of the map, new Riddler collectibles and challenges, new equipment, and new bits of story and missions. Sure it has cosmetic microtransactions, but I'm more than happy for a company like Rocksteady Studios to fund more games via Harley Quinn outfit sales, especially since all of the "game" parts of the game are coming out for free to anyone who already bought it.
I love games, and I love talking about games with other people who do too. It's a shame that fans tying their self worth to a product they haven't actually engaged with dominates any actually interesting conversation about reality instead. I could care less about WB Games' bottom line, but it would be nice to not dispute the definitions of words when I actually want to talk about what is in a great game in the first place.
Thanks for reading Parry Timing. Part of this project is about trying to increase literacy and critical thinking in the pop culture audience, so addressing recent blowout discourse about live service games seemed valuable, if a bit ranty. I’m really digging Suicide Squad, even with its issues, and I was really annoyed that no one who wanted to talk about it actually wanted to talk about it. Free Palestine.