Following a poor showing at PlayStation’s State of Play back in February, Rocksteady has made to delay its Suicide Squad game by a whopping nine months
Originally scheduled to release next month on May 26, 2023, developer Rocksteady has now announced that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League won’t in fact hit that date. It follows a harsh round of criticism that came after its most recent showing at PlayStation’s State of Play presentation back in February, where many players and critics alike were left unimpressed by what they saw from this co-operative open-world superhero shooter.
Taking to Twitter to provide the update, Rocksteady said in its post that “We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players”. The newly scheduled release date for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is now February 2, 2024 – nine months after its previously intended May release date.
If you’ve been paying close attention to the rumour mill, the game’s delay won’t come as too much of a surprise. According to Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier it had been known about internally at the studio for quite some time. Schreier went on to provide some additional context in his own Twitter post. “Nine months is not enough time to completely change the nature of a game,” he said, putting a pin in the idea that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is about to incur some giant overhaul as a result of the delay.
Rocksteady neglected to mention in its tweet what issues it hopes to address, but even by usual delay standards nine months is quite a sizeable shift of time period. There’s a chance that publisher Warner Bros. looked at the reception to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League as far back as February and decided to delay it to avoid the game garnering a similar reception to last year’s Batman spin-off Gotham Knights, though this hasn’t been confirmed.
Bat to basics
Ever since we got our first look at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League during the inaugural DC Fandome digital event back in 2020, it’s been clear that this isn’t a style of game Batman: Arkham Asylum fans are familiar with. Whereas Rocksteady’s first video game outing in the Batman universe was a fresh-feeling Metroidvania set in the titular asylum, its latest effort hues closer towards the type of live-service experienced popularised by games like Destiny.
This isn’t to say that an online co-operative experience set in the world of Batman can’t be fun, it's just that it’s a shame Rocksteady felt the need to go this route with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League when it previously had been on a roll with the Arkham trilogy. 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight had a lot of problems, but it felt like a singular, focused experience that had vision. This Suicide Squad just wants you to shoot at glowing purple targets.
Like Schreier mentioned in his tweet, this delay to February won’t have a dramatically big impact on the type of game Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League shakes out to be. All Rocksteady can hope to do now is to make it as good a co-operative superhero shooter as it possibly can be, rather than trying to transform it into something it was never intended to be. Regardless, no amount of extra polish will be able to make people forget about the game’s incredibly rocky road to release.
