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.

  • P03 Locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 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.