Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leagueis just a few weeks out from release, but Arkham fans have had little in the way to get excited about. Previews of the game have been dire, and it’sconstantly being roasted on social media for its UIandchanges to certain major characters. It’s caused somewhat of a resurgence of an old rumor that Rocksteady once had a Superman game in the works that was scrapped in favor of Suicide Squad, but a new report has finally debunked them.
According toBloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, the idea that Warner Bros. rejected a pitch for a standalone Superman game from Rocksteady is completely false, yet the rumor has circulated on social media and been spread by high-profile content creators for years. In actuality, Schreier’s sources claim that work on a Batman VR game and an unannounced multiplayer game based on an original IP immediately started after the release of Batman: Arkham Knight.
Rocksteady’s pivot to a multiplayer Suicide Squad apparently came when Warner Bros. handed the property to the studio in 2017, following the internal cancelation of a different Suicide Squad game being made by a Warner Bros. team in Montreal. The studio has been working on nothing else but Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League since then, meaning the game will have been in development for close to seven years.
Schreier claims that the original rumor that Rocksteady had a Superman game pitch rejected came fromTwitter user James Sigfield, who clarified to Schreier in a private conversation that they later corrected themselves after their sources “got the studios mixed up”, but nobody noticed the correction. That rumor subsequently spread like wildfire and eventually became seemingly common knowledge among the Arkham community.
While it’s nice to finally get a years-old rumor cleared up in this fashion, this new info also tells us that Rocksteady always wanted to make a multiplayer game of some kind following the release of Batman: Arkham Knight. Warner Bros. doesn’t seem to have forced Rocksteady into doing anything it didn’t already want to do, and we still would’ve got a similar multiplayer experience had the studio never been given the Suicide Squad property in the first place.
Either way, Rocksteady will more than likely be regretting that decision when reviews drop for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and fans finally get their hands on it. There’s always the possibility that the game could be fairly decent, but Rocksteady couldn’t buy positive publicity at the moment, and there’s a general feeling the game is going to be dead on arrival. We’ll have to wait and see whether the game surprises us when it launches in a few weeks.
