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.

top 12 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] RightHandOfIkaros 120 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

It is amazing how out of touch someone can be with reality.

Also, classic blaming the guy that just left. Maybe he contributed to some of the issues, but I guarantee there was a mountain of other issues unrelated to this guy.

[–] CosmoNova 59 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Most of the execs never tried their hands on a game including this one. They genuinely have no idea about the industry and thought they had a hit game on their hands based on a trailer or something. It‘s truly baffling yet so typical.

[–] krashmo 57 points 5 months ago (1 children)

MBAs have no useful skills and yet they run every company in existence.

[–] Hugin 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When I was getting my engineering degree in the senior year we had some question and answer sessions with people from industry. The guy in class who thought he was way smarter than he was asked about going directly into an MBA program after graduation.

The industry guy said it was a terrible idea. Your engineering knowledge would be 2 years out of date and who knows if you would be a good manager. He said to get a job and get some experience. If you show promise as a leader a good company will offer to put you through a MBA program and you well have the real world experience to make the best of it.

So I think there is a real use for an MBA degree but only after some real world experience in your field and showing basic team leadership. People who go straight for an MBA tend to be the those who just want to boss people around and can't handle real work.

[–] krashmo 2 points 5 months ago

Exactly. I would say an MBA is only useful if your undergrad degree was in something other than business. It is meant to add management skills to an already skilled individual. If you don't have any other skills it's just an expensive piece of paper that, at least to me, signifies essentially the same thing as being the boss's son would. You probably aren't very good at anything but always think you're the smartest person in the room.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 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.

[–] Carighan 4 points 5 months ago

And the worst is, the C-suites get to fuck shit up, reap massive bonuses, and never suffer any con-S-quences when inevitable their way of running the company causes shit like this to happen.

[–] LifeOfChance 1 points 5 months ago

What reality though? Companies are trying now more than ever to release the shittest cheapest games they can for massive gains. We see more and more trash making insane money. The reality is the average person will play a shitty game for something to do especially if it's within their interests. In this case it just happened to fail so WB will fire a bunch of people and try something again. It's a learning experience in the sense that they know they gotta raise the bar for the next release but it won't be anything substantial.

[–] lazycouchpotato 25 points 5 months ago (1 children)

WB lost $200 million on it. Jeez.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

Should have lost more.

[–] tabris 13 points 5 months ago

This What Happened episode has a few other details.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago

I was a big Arkham fan so I watched a whole playthrough.

I enjoyed watching all the cutscenes. Great voice acting and motion capture. Writing felt alright to me but the overall story was kinda lame and the ending was terribly unsatisfying due to the need for it to remain open ended. The gameplay seemed like it'd be fun for 3 or 4 missions.

Overall it looked like an average game weighed down by corporate bullshit, which was obvious from the previews.