Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad Game Is Finished—Now What?

The Suicide Squad is dead, kind of. Long live the Suicide Squad… kind of.

Almost a full year after its launch, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League came to an end this week with its last major update. Said ending is a bit of an odd duck: after finally whittling down the final Brainiac’s health bars, players watch an animated cutscene narrated by Harley Quinn wherein the Squad and the living, now-free Justice League members who Brainiac had cloned—and had been on the receiving end of the Squad’s sometimes juvenile brutality—team up to take the Coluan down before going off to set everything right, both in their universe and others the various Brainaics terrorized. It’s a somewhat definitive end that also feels like it came suddenly, especially when you think about how quickly Warner Bros. wanted to clean its hands of this project.

In any case, the question hovering around Suicide Squad is “what’s next,” particularly for Rocksteady. The answer is simple, but also not, when we look at the studio’s contemporaries. After failing to get its Anthem rework going, BioWare pivoted to remastering the Mass Effect trilogy and beginning full development on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Going by that logic, you’d think we’d be due some Batman: Arkham remasters to ease Rocksteady back into the single-player swing, but Return to Arkham exists, and Arkham Knight turns 10 years old this June. (WB Montreal, which made Arkham Origins, helped with Squad’s development and recently cut staff, as did Rocksteady shortly after.) Last June, sources told Bloomberg Rocksteady’s immediate future is helping put together a director’s cut of 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy, then… we don’t know, but it’s presumably a single-player mulligan to get the studio back on track.

Online, the popular expectation and hope is another Batman game, preferably one that just writes Suicide Squad off as non-canon or doesn’t address it. By now, wouldn’t the studio be better served getting out of the Batman hole and tackling another DC hero? Before Squad’s release, various (and later debunked) rumors claimed Rocksteady was making a Superman game, and of this game’s high points, its recreation of Metropolis is considered pretty good. And if not the Man of Steel, literally any other hero who isn’t Wonder Woman would do at this point. By now, this team’s been working on Batman for just over 15 years, and it’s more than time to let someone new take a crack at the cowl, either in Gotham’s present or future.

© Rocksteady Alternatively, it might do Rocksteady some good to get out of the DC cage completely and make its own thing. To date, its sole non-DC game is its debut title, 2006’s Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Something brand new probably should’ve been the direction to go after Knight, but this is as good an opportunity as any to move on. Returning to the Arkham well once more would only make things ever weirder than it was when we learned this was canon to those games. Making the team spend years and millions of dollars creating a single-player apology isn’t the best use of anyone’s time, and it’s not like we aren’t getting another Bat-game eventually. For all the fears folks have had about Insomniac becoming a Marvel games machine, that’s very much happened with Rocksteady, which is clearly full of talented people who should get the opportunity to spread their wings. Recently, Naughty Dog and Ryu Ga Gatoku teased out their first wholly new properties in years, and I’d be curious to know what Rocksteady could make outside the confines of a famous comic book property. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what an original sci-fi, horror, western, or whatever else game looks like from this team?

In a fair world, Suicide Squad would get to get out on better, less compromised terms, or at the very least, Rocksteady wouldn’t be stuck footing the bill for it. As is, we can only hope WB and its leadership will just let the game studio figure out what it wants to do with what it’s best at, and cook from there. Other studios have recovered from worse, but the ability to walk away from less than stellar titles isn’t being afforded for every developer these days, and that would be a crappy full circle moment for a team that’s built up a lot of goodwill up to now.

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