For a brief while, Rocksteady appeared to be breaking free from the DC realm
According to reports, Rocksteady Studios cancelled an entirely other game in order to work on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Despite the fact that it has only developed five games, Rocksteady Firms is one of the most regarded studios in the gaming business, three of which were part of its acclaimed Batman Arkham trilogy and one of which was a VR spin-off.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will be the studio’s sixth game and the first in nearly a decade, following the release of Arkham Knight in 2015. Many people are perplexed by Rocksteady’s decision to produce this game given the genre and the fact that the studio is primarily known for single player games.
However, this was not Rocksteady’s first multiplayer game. Rocksteady Studios was working on an original multiplayer game unrelated to the DC universe, according to a new piece from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier. However, in 2016, Warner Bros. Montreal was working on a Suicide Squad game (presumably based on the post-credits scene at the conclusion of Batman: Arkham Origins), and when it was shelved, the property became available to Rocksteady. It’s unclear whether Rocksteady was coerced into working on a Suicide Squad game or if the developer actively wanted to work on one, especially given it already had plans for multiplayer games following Batman.
In any case, it’s evident that Rocksteady was at one point interested in leaving the DC universe. The statement also emphasizes that Rocksteady Studios never pitched or worked on a Superman game once its Batman trilogy was completed, and that speculations of such a thing are false.
It’s unclear whether Rocksteady will ever return to this other project. We have no idea what this game would have looked like or whether it would have been co-op, first-person, or preserved any of Suicide Squad’s RPG components. Some of these items may have made their way into the game, but we don’t know for sure. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, according to the source, has been in production for 7 years, which is a pretty long time for any game, thus it has most certainly experienced a lot of changes since its inception.
We asked Rocksteady why it didn’t produce a standard Justice League game at a Suicide Squad preview event a few weeks ago, and they gave us a few reasons, including the fact that they wanted to make something completely different from their prior work. “I think the Justice League are the perfect antagonists because they’re everything that the Squad is not,” said the Production Manager Jack Hackett.
“I think that contrast, and then flipping the good and evil, both sides are begrudgingly on the wrong side. The Squad are evil, and they’re being forced to be good, and the League ends up being forced to be bad. That’s just a fun, compelling narrative. You don’t want to just create what people are expecting, because then they will never be surprised by what you’ve made, and we’ve made something we thought would be surprising, would be exciting. Something that excited us to make it.”