Rocksteady Announce Suicide Squad Game

[ZariusTwo]

More details to come at DC Fandome


https://twitter.com/RocksteadyGames/...20790447136768

[oldmanwinters]

I read the thread title preview as "Rocksteady announce Suicide," and I was like... "my condolences to Bebop's family."

[frank_one]

Originally Posted by oldmanwinters

I read the thread title preview as "Rocksteady announce Suicide," and I was like... "my condolences to Bebop's family."

My same reaction

[Leo656]

How odd that it appears to be Superman in that picture, considering he's only barely Squad-adjacent, generally speaking. Huh.

They make good games, I'll keep my eyes open. I've been longing for a good super-hero game that isn't Batman or Spider-Man for just, like, the longest time.

[frank_one]

I would love a good X-men game with missions all over the world.

[Cure]

With the "target" on his head, I'm assuming he's gonna be the main antagonist. It's just my guess, but I hope I'm wrong. It's been done enough in the Injustice games.

[Leo656]

Not a bad guess.

I love the Injustice games, but I agree. I'd rather finally have a new Superman game than yet another "we're making him the de facto heel because programming him as the protagonist is more work than we feel like doing" situation.

I hear all this chatter for years now about how hard or "impossible" it is to make a decent Superman game, and it's such total nonsense. Maybe none of them have ever been fantastic but I can think of at least four that were "Pretty good, would have been great with a little more time in the oven." Few of the Superman games were ever fundamentally broken; only Superman 64 was ever really busted from the ground up. I feel like that game's reputation taints the entire catalog of Superman games. Most of them are at least playable. "Superman Returns" was on a good track, but being tied to the movie really hurt it. When it ignored the movie trappings, it showed potential; with another six months of development, a better targeting system, and an actual ending, it would have been pretty good. But even "Superman: The Man of Steel" from like 2001 wasn't terrible; if you remove the horrible timed missions that give you less than five seconds to complete your objective, the rest of the game is pretty good. Pretty hard, but they got pretty close on the whole. "Shadow of Apokolips" was good. Even "Death and Return of Superman" was a perfectly serviceable beat-'em-up, it just broke no new ground and suffered from a severe lack of enemy variety. It was still fun to play, though.

Point being, if with most games based on a character the worst you can say is, "I wish it had been in development for six more months," that's not really very damning. They've repeatedly been on the right track only to run out of time or money or both, but I don't understand how that translates to "It's impossible to make a good game where you play as Superman for the duration." The same thing used to be true for Batman games. Same thing could happen for Superman, someone would just need to really apply themselves.

But yeah, as far as this game is concerned he's probably be the Big Bad the Squad gets assigned to. Either he's possessed/gone rogue or someone just wants him out of the way. I can see it. I'unno, we'll see what transpires. I'm curious. There's like no super-hero games anymore when we used to be drowning in them, so I'm hopeful and optimistic about getting something fun that isn't Batman for a change. It's like I really like most of the Batman and Spider-Man games that have come out in the last 10+ years, I just hate that that's all we really get nowadays.

[Andrew NDB]

Yeah, pretty clearly it's going to be a "We gotta take down Superman!" kind of thing.

Eh. OK. I'll play it. Not what I was hoping for from the next Rocksteady game. I was thinking either just a fourth Batman game, a straight up Superman game (I was hoping most for this), or the "World's Finest" thing that was rumored that might have things toggle back and forth between Batman and Superman. Or maybe a full-on Justice League game.

Suicide Squad? Well, fine. Not super exciting to me, though.

[Sumac]

I was in doubt, whether it is Superman or not, because, I know that Superman is not really related to Suicide Squad. But it is seems to be the case.

Oh, well, I hope Rocksteady will make the game where you play as villains or anti-heroes, instead of using old tired "Superman is evil" crap.

On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past them to do so: Superman is white fit and healthy heterosexual male, so in the eyes of the "dumbgressives" he might as well be literally Hitler. And big developers LOVE to fit in with the Twatter crowd.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

Yeah, pretty clearly it's going to be a "We gotta take down Superman!" kind of thing.

Eh. OK. I'll play it. Not what I was hoping for from the next Rocksteady game. I was thinking either just a fourth Batman game, a straight up Superman game (I was hoping most for this), or the "World's Finest" thing that was rumored that might have things toggle back and forth between Batman and Superman. Or maybe a full-on Justice League game.

Suicide Squad? Well, fine. Not super exciting to me, though.

Yeah, same. Pretty much exactly the same. For this, I'm "curious and hopeful" but I can't say I'm "excited".

The Batman games were great but I'm over it. Let someone else have a turn at the plate, dammit. I have zero doubt that for all their "We just don't think we could do it well" nonsense, if they applied themselves they could make a great Superman game. I've played good Hulk games, "Ultimate Destruction" in particular; just take the strength and "indestructible" elements and the interactive, smash-able environments, add the flying from "Superman Returns" (which was awesome and the best part of the game by far) and some heat vision and you've more or less nailed it already.

Everything these people swear "can't be done" in a Superman game has already been done very well in other games! They've just never been assembled into one package, mostly for time/budget reasons. Well, then do that! Don't tell me "We can't figure out how to make the character super-strong and mostly-invulnerable without breaking the game", when there's a really awesome Hulk game that lets you rip cars in half and use them as boxing gloves. Don't tell me "We can't figure out the flying" when even a mediocre game like "Superman Returns" had incredible flying mechanics. Games from 15 years ago already did all the stuff they swear "can't" be done properly! Don't f*cking lie to me you lazy hacks! You just don't wanna put the work in!

I'd definitely settle for a "World's Finest" game if I had to, though, sure. If for no other reason than a game where they fight and/or team up really hasn't been done yet, but should have been by now. Even if the movie wasn't to everyone's taste, BvS would have made an awesome, awesome video game. It's a real shame they didn't bother. I get why, they're expensive, but ignoring that, it could've been perfect, speaking purely hypothetically. I'd love a Superman/Batman team-up game, I really hope someone gets around to it one day.

We're also long overdue for another Justice League game. I know that "Justice League Heroes" didn't do so hot, but people weren't really fair about it, either. It came out after both X-Men Legends games, was a fair bit shorter and only had two on-screen characters at once instead of four, so everybody said it felt like a half-baked rip-off, but I don't think that's fair at all. Sure, if they had another six months to pad the length, added more missions and managed to put four playable characters on-screen, that would have been nice, but the game as it exists is still perfectly fine and a lot of fun to play, especially with the New Game + feature. It is short, and rather easy, and it's missing a lot of the side content like Flashback Missions and Danger Room/Training stuff which made the X-Men Legends games so stellar, but it was also their first swing. I was really hoping for a sequel so we could get some of that stuff, but alas, it never happened. But it SHOULD have, because it was a good game.

The two "Injustice" games might be my two favorite fighting games - they're definitely up there, although I admit I'm hardly a hardcore fighting game guy - but I can't believe that it's 2020 and the only thing developers can think to do with the DC pantheon of characters is stick 'em in a fighting game. Christ, Wonder Woman never even had a solo game, how sh*tty is that to realize? Granted, she maybe wasn't popular enough before to carry one, but surely she could now.

DC has all these amazing characters but they still only really do Batman stuff for video games, mostly. Very frustrating. I know "money talks", but geez, man, you're leaving money on the table, here.

Originally Posted by Sumac

I was in doubt, whether it is Superman or not, because, I know that Superman is not really related to Suicide Squad. But it is seems to be the case.

Only one guy in the last 100 years has ever successfully and prominently rocked a spitcurl. If the cape didn't give it away the haircut sure did.

[Turo602]

This is probably bullsh*t, but I saw either somewhere or someone say that the subtitle was Kill the Justice League. My guess is, this will either spin-off into a Justice League game, which was once rumored to be what Rocksteady was working on, or they're simply reusing Superman from their cancelled game and working him into the story. Regardless, I would have much preferred a Superman game.

Like Leo said, the whole "Superman can't work as a video game" narrative is complete bullsh*t. When I see games like the new God of War and Anthem, I can't help but imagine them reskinned as a Superman game and just go from there.

I was literally telling my brother yesterday that God of War-esque combat would fit a Superman game because he's more of a brawler and he hits hard. I even thought of a way they could balance his strength by implementing a power meter, which you can build up through combat and let's you unleash some of Superman's strength with some hard hitting blows that create sonic booms and can also be depleted by unleashing a devastating heat vision blast.

You don't want Superman to feel overpowered but you don't want to feel weak either, which is completely doable. I don't get how Superman has been in stories for over 80 years and people still view him as this impossible character who is just too strong and powerful for his own good like if that's what's really holding him back from having a good video game and not just their lack of knowledge and imagination.

The only problem I can really think of is the scope of the game, which seems less and less impossible these days since ideally, you'll want to fly across large reaches of land and space since confining Superman to just Metropolis would be kind of boring.

But I can't help but wonder if the only reason we haven't gotten a Superman game is the same reason we haven't gotten a sequel to Man of Steel. We only got Batman: Arkham Asylum because they failed to make a game for The Dark Knight and there's been rumors about a Suicide Squad game for a long time which was no doubt meant to coincide with the 2016 film since it was set up in Arkham Origins. A Justice League game was even rumored at some point but probably ditched because the movie flopped. So to hear they also dropped a Superman game in favor for Suicide Squad just when a new movie is about to release does seem rather suspicious.

Rocksteady has been really silent and haven't released anything for over 5 years, and if the reason is because WB has them fumbling through multiple projects based on film success, then that's really sh*tty. We already know they use the animated DC films to test the waters for interest in potential live action films, so I really wouldn't be surprised if this is how they're treating their gaming division.

[Leo656]

I mean, you're right about how it could be a problem of scale and scope, and how just being in/around Metropolis can be boring, or confining, but both the "Man of Steel" game from the early 2000s as well as "Superman Returns" both addressed that problem fairly well. In the former, there were SO many different environments to play through based on whatever missions you were doing, from Metropolis to Deep Space and even The Phantom Zone. So that's all been done already rather easily. And with the latter, even though the SR game was 99% set in Metropolis, they made Metropolis f*cking HUGE to compensate for it. It took a good amount of time even flying at full-speed to get from one edge of the map to the other. I can't even imagine what they could do now, with modern technology and programming skills, to take the better parts of those two games and make something grand.

Like, the scale of Metropolis and the random event missions and having to keep the city from sustaining too much damage or else you'd lose, were all things about the SR game that were highly praised by just about everyone. It's just the game didn't actually give you a ton of things to really DO, the enemy and mission variety in that game were rather mediocre, there weren't enough good Boss fights, so all of that space wasn't really put to great use. Were they on the right track, though? Definitely, definitely. I like the game that's there, it just feels like it was only half-done. The targeting and hand-to-hand combat wasn't great but some things were like totally, "Yeah, that's how that should be done."

I like your combat ideas. I also liked in "Hulk: Ultimate Destruction" how you'd be able to level-up and get cooler, more powerful attacks that used more of the environment and things. I feel like all of that could be combined into something that totally fits Superman perfectly. They already had stuff like him using cars and boulders and statues as projectiles, and lamp posts as baseball bats and stuff like that, but just imagine him doing some of the stuff from the Hulk game, that would be so epic.

He also has some standard "Finishing Moves" or "high spots" he often uses when fighting the real bruisers that would be awesome to see and control. Stuff like punching people across the sky a'la Zod in "Man of Steel", flying someone high up into the lower atmosphere and then slamming or German suplexing them into the ground, the super-speed "Giant Swing", dragging someone face-first across the ground (or again, like Zod in MoS, across the side of a building) at high-speed... to actually be the one pulling off those moves would be absolutely incredible. Nobody throws down like Superman, and with good reason... who else is gonna get in a fistfight with f*cking Darkseid? I mean he's generally not considered "a fighter" by a lot of people since most stories he's in require him to use other powers to come up with solutions to whatever issue he's facing, but when he DOES fight, it's with a power and fury that makes everyone witnessing it take pause and be glad they're not the one he's mad at. The "Injustice" games do a good job recreating that, so I feel that a regular action game could find a way to do it as well. The one big problem with the combat in most Superman games is that he never feels much stronger than whoever he's fighting. But those kinds of balance issues can always be easily fixed with more time and testing.

As you said, games like God of War do a great job of making the player feel like an invincible, unstoppable bad-ass. I haven't played the newest one, but when I played the original trilogy, I never felt so absolutely empowered before from any action game. And even though I rarely if ever died or whatever, I had nothing but fun the entire time. In the year 2020, I don't think we can anymore equate a "balanced" game with "risk of dying/losing" or whatever. Games like "Force Unleashed" are almost impossible to actually "lose" but they're still a lot of fun. If the point of the game is, "The protagonist is an Unstoppable Badass", then your job as a developer isn't necessarily in trying to create "challenge", it's to recreate that "Unstoppable Badass" feeling and make the game Fun. Nobody who ever played any God of War game ever said, "This was awesome, EXCEPT it was too easy and I didn't die enough." You're too busy having fun to even notice that it's kind of easy. That's the point! When developers are like, "We can't do Superman because we don't know how to create sufficient challenge or make him vulnerable", it shows that they're taking a wrongheaded approach to the material.

"He's too strong for the Bad Guys." So work around it. "He can't be killed." Work around it. Maybe don't think about ways to backdoor some cheap deaths in, or adding 5-second time limits to missions as a way to create "challenge". Maybe it doesn't need to be incredibly challenging, and it can "just" be non-stop fun? Maybe have him fight Darkseid, and have to beat him in part by using his entire skillset as well as the environment to avoid his Omega Beams and turn them back on him. Maybe have him need to fight his way through literally thousands of Parademons, "Dynasty Warriors" style, and have that be a level or mission, with Bonuses awarded for style and using different attacks. There's so many incredible things that can be done, once you get past the "Well, how can the player 'lose' the game if the main character is indestructible?" hangup. If I'm playing as "Superman", the absolute LAST thing I wanna do, is lose a mission because of a stray punch from some generic mook, or fail because the mission has a 5-second time limit. The developers put that stuff in past games to "create a challenge" and all it did was make them not fun. Maybe making the game constantly "challenging" isn't the right way to execute a Superman game, and it should just be incredibly empowering with you the player constantly doing amazing and over-the-top things instead of worrying about time limits and cheap deaths? Food for thought.

I go on, I know. I just play so many goddamn video games, and love Superman so much, that obviously this is something I think about all the time. Like "WHY can't they just do THIS and slap a red cape on it?" Every day. It's frustrating. I know someone will crack it one day, it's just... it's been 15 years since the last game. 15 years! Superman hasn't gone 15 years without his name in the title of a game for as long as video games have been around. That's f*cking horrible.

[Redeemer]

Why can we not get a TMNT game like this???
I will probably getting this day 1. I loved all the Rocksteady Arkham games.

[LeotheLateBloomer]

I called it a while back that Rocksteady was working on a game with Harley Quinn as a playable character since Arkham Knight was testing waters with her DLC and also due to her popularity in recent years.

Though I am curious about the plot. This doesn't seem like the kind of mission Waller would assign for them despite her odds with the Justice League. Playing as the villains sounds more interesting than playing as anti-heroes so this does sound like it could be fun.

I also heard rumors of an Injustice 3 and WB Montreal working on the next Batman game which honestly as much as I love the Arkham games, I can kinda go without another one. Though port the Arkham games to the Switch and that'll be a Day 1 purchase for me!

[Turo602]

Don't know how to feel about this yet. It's just a CG trailer and it's still years away, so the announcement seems a bit premature. Though the way they're highlighting Metropolis and Superman just really makes me sour because I get the feeling they just repurposed their Superman game into Suicide Squad.

[Andrew NDB]

Originally Posted by Redeemer

Why can we not get a TMNT game like this???

Because TMNT games don't sell.

[Turo602]

Originally Posted by Andrew NDB

Because TMNT games don't sell.

Because they haven't made a good one yet.

[Leo656]

Originally Posted by Turo602

Though the way they're highlighting Metropolis and Superman just really makes me sour because I get the feeling they just repurposed their Superman game into Suicide Squad.

I'd wager a reasonable sum of money that that's entirely what happened. And that it has an awful lot to do with whose next movie is coming out first.

"Priorities".

[LeotheLateBloomer]

Yeah...I'm gonna need to see gameplay as it's hard for me to get too excited without one. It looks like it'll be fun to play as these characters though especially Harley. 2022 is so far away and I for one am glad that it'll be releasing only for the next-gen consoles.

[TigerClaw]

Judging by the way Superman looked in the trailer it seems he and other Justice League members are under some sort of mind control.

Given that the title is Kill The Justice League. Are they actually gonna kill all of them? Or the title is just a metaphor?

Another thing to keep in mind is that this game takes place in the Arkham universe. So its cool to see it opening up to show more of this world.