Rocksteady Canceled a New Multiplayer Game for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

Rocksteady Studios reportedly canceled a completely different game in favor of working on Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Rocksteady Studios is one of the most respected studios in the gaming industry, despite the fact they have only made five games, three of which were part of its acclaimed Batman Arkham trilogy and another being a VR spin-off. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League will be the studio's sixth game and the first game in nearly a decade, as Arkham Knight was released in 2015. However, many are a bit puzzled by Rocksteady's decision to make this game given the genre it falls under and the fact that the studio is best known for single player games.

This wasn't the first multiplayer game that Rocksteady planned, though. According to a new post from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Rocksteady Studios was working on an original multiplayer game, unrelated to the DC universe. However, Warner Bros. Montreal was working on a Suicide Squad game (likely following up on the post-credits scene at the end of Batman: Arkham Origins) in 2016 and once it was canceled, the property opened up to Rocksteady. It's unclear if Rocksteady was forcefully moved over to this project or if the developer actively wanted to work on a Suicide Squad game, especially since it already had ambitions for multiplayer games after Batman. Either way, it's clear Rocksteady was at least at one point interested in removing itself from the world of DC. The post also goes on to reiterate that Rocksteady Studios never pitched or worked on any kind of Superman game after its Batman trilogy was concluded and the rumors of such a thing are incorrect.

Whether or not Rocksteady will ever return to this other project is a mystery. We have absolutely no idea what this game would have looked like and if it would've been co-op, first-person, or retained any of the RPG elements in Suicide Squad. It's possible that some of these things made their way into the game, but we don't know for sure. According to the report, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been in development for 7 years, which is a very long time for any game, so it has likely seen a lot of changes since its initial inception. 

We got to ask Rocksteady why it didn't make a traditional Justice League game at a preview event for Suicide Squad a few weeks ago and were given a few reasons, namely the fact that they wanted to make something very different from its previous work. "I think the Justice League are the perfect antagonists because they're everything that the Squad is not," said 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 end 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."