Jason Schreier: Rocksteady Studios never pitched a Superman game, began work on new MP IP following Arkham Knight, given Suicide Squad in 2017.
- Thread starter LightKiosk
- Start date
I don't know why people find it surprising that Rocksteady wanted to work on a MP game. It's not like a developer really wanting to do something means it will automatically be good.
It's gonna be one hell of an uphill battle for this game if they manage to get it off the ground. The game is fun to play but the service aspect may be a tough pill to swallow these days.
Wasn't the Montreal Suicide Squad game basically a Borderlands rip off, maybe they should have just kept with that...
That's not outlandish in the current generation of ballooning budgets and dev times. Most of the games releasing today have been in development for closer to a decade than not, especially with COVID messing up schedules, and a lot of AAA games that begin development today most likely won't even be targeting this generation.
More like 6-7. Probably would have been 5-6 without COVID. Seems more believable than the takes that they were working on SS since Arkham Knight which would have been insane.
Article states they got handed the canned Montreal SS game end of 2016, so I'd imagine they'd have originally were going to try to finish whatever Montreal did? Then dev changed in 2017 to the game we see now?
I think there's this perception that every "bad" idea is forced upon studios by guys in suits, which may have some truth to it, but its very easy to see why a studio might want to try their hand at a MP/GAAS type game, for the same reason publishers and execs do, because if you make one and it hits is a huge money maker for everyone involved. Sometimes it feels like people here want to believe that developers hate MP and GAAS as much as they do.
Well I suppose that's better than Superman already being rejected. I hope some studio gives it a try someday.
I guess we can argue about "wanted" to make one, but whether or not they got saddled with Suicide Squad this confirms that they were always going to pivot to an MP game regardless after the Arkham games. As NinjaScooter mentions it's not uncommon for a lot of SP game focused studios to want to make multiplayer games, it's one of the biggest genres on the market and a successful title of that sort invites the potential for an evergreen large fanbase/retention if pulled off successfully.
There's no chance they were all-hands-on-deck for Arkham VR, and some of the Arkham Knight DLC was farmed out. SS likely isn't that much of a departure from whatever multiplayer IP they were building either, since it's weirdly gun focused. I think we can assume closer to 8-9 years at this point
![00Quan[T]](/data/avatar/31681832007/115484-m.jpg){kind=avatar}
Not really, if they had gotten to make the MP game they wanted it probably wouldn't have forced out much of the talent including studio heads
That is roughly same timeframe or possibly even more than RDR2 development.
Did this "trilogy" not have a proper ending. I don't get why people are so hung up on being "denied" another Arkham game.
6-7 years of production is long and must have been ludicrously expensive. I've been a part of many huge AAA games, only the R* ones had a similar dev cycle ... and that's Rockstar.
Best of luck to Rocksteady.
Best of luck to Rocksteady.
after 8 years, people just want another batman game. and they easily could have done a batmand beyond/batman of the future game. still batman, but everything else is new and fresh.
RDR2 had a notoriously "year-long" hyper crunched development cycle (not ruling out that Suicide Squad wasn't) and wasn't developed in peak COVID times, so this is an apples and oranges comparison.
It is also much more detailed game with much more complex AI and in general much bigger game.
The way a lot of gamers talk about development studios you'd assume they were little more than code monkeys forced to toil on whatever assignment the bosses foist upon them. Especially in scenarios like this where you have a developer owned by a publisher and the relationship as often described comes off as downright infantilized. God forbid these studios have autonomy and are capable of fucking these things up of their own accord.
The Superman game debunk particularly hurts because the narrative for so long was that WB strongarmed Rocksteady into a shitty GaaS hell and away from their perfectly-good single-player AAA Superman game and that turning out to all be bullshit really fucks with that overall framing.
Could they? It's that easy?
Maybe they wanted a break from Batman.
Nothing screams fresh and new like a 5th Batman game.
My point is, I would hope people aren't yelling at Insomniac to make Spider-Man 4 in a decade (which would be their 5th one since 2018).
Bigger fumble than Arkane management trying to do the same with Redfall.
I know we think of fidelity as a big factor in how much needs to go into game development, but building and designing a game reliant on an extensive online infrastructure is not a cakewalk. We've seen how Naughty Dog had toiled away at the cancelled TLOU Factions for some 3-4 years before they cut life support on what was seemingly to many supposed to be a smaller project. Who knows how much onboarding that Rocksteady needed in tackling everything surrounding the MP in what was clearly meant to possibly be their biggest title ever made?
you took a really strong singleplayer team and put them on mp. when it was announced years ago that they were making a multiplayer game it was already a pass for me. I literally remember talking to my buddy dave about it and we both kinda just had a soured look from that news. and we have done multiple runs in the arkham games its just so good.
if it was actually a fully narrative driven not chasing fomo co op game like batman and robin we probably would have been down for it lol.
if it was actually a fully narrative driven not chasing fomo co op game like batman and robin we probably would have been down for it lol.
Naughty dogs went on record, calling factions their most ambitious game they ever made at that point, so it wasn't a smaller project.