Suicide Squad is currently in the midst of its first post-launch season starring the Joker, and while player numbers for the loot shooter have failed to materialize, the game will still deliver its promised year-one roadmap, publisher Warner Bros. confirms. That means that it won’t pull a full Anthem and completely ditch its post-launch plans, despite a report that Rocksteady Studios is already largely focused on other projects.
“Suicide Squad will complete its currently announced roadmap,” a spokesperson for the publisher told Kotaku in an email on June 7. That roadmap currently runs through four seasons, each with a new playable character, a new playable environment, and additional activities, skins, and balance updates. Suicide Squad is currently finishing the first episode of season 1 with a second episode expected to drop soon, but Rocksteady Games hasn’t been clear about the timing, or if future seasons will last just as long.
Anyone who’s played a live-service game that’s died, like BioWare’s ill-fated Anthem or Crystal Dynamics’ Marvel’s Avengers, knows that future plans are at the mercy of initial momentum. It’s not clear Suicide Squad ever made a big enough positive splash in the first place to have a major audience to win back over, let alone the legs to slowly build one over a costly first year of updates. With no frank acknowledgement of the game’s struggles since launch, and weekly update blog posts now becoming more intermittent, fans have naturally began to wonder if Warner Bros. was quietly pulling back from its over $200 million flop.
Then last week Bloomberg reported that many developers at Rocksteady had already been moved to working on a director’s cut of Hogwarts Legacy while studio leadership tried to pitch Warner Bros. on a new single-player project that would return the Batman: Arkham maker to its roots. Warner Bros. didn’t comment on those parts of the report, or offer any suggestion that Suicide Squad would continue releasing new updates after its promised first year. It’s also unclear how much of those post-launch seasons, which were expected to wrap up the main campaign’s inconclusive non-ending, are completed, or if a lot of work still needs to be done on them.
Mr. Freeze has already been leaked as the next seasonal character, though Suicide Squad will have to make bigger changes than that to make it worth playing.
