the Suicide Squad dead, sort of. Long live the Suicide Squad… sort of.

Almost a full year after its launch, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League ended this week with its last major update. Said ending is a bit of an odd duck: after finally cutting off the last of Brainiac’s health bars, players watch an animated cutscene narrated by Harley Quinn in which the Squad and the living , now unpaid members of the Justice League cloned by Brainiac—and done. on the Squad’s receiving end sometimes juvenile brutality—Work together to bring down the Coluan before setting off to set everything right, both in their universe and with the rest of the Brainaics that are being terrorized. It’s a certain ending that also feels like it came too suddenly, especially when you consider how quickly Warner Bros. want to clean hands of this project.

In any case, the question goes around Suicide Squad is “what’s next,” especially for Rocksteady. The answer is simple, but also not, if we look at the contemporaries of the studio. After failing to get it SONGS again at work, BioWare pivots to remaster the Mass Effect trilogy and began the full development of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Going by that logic, you’d think we’d need some Batman: Arkham remasters to ease Rocksteady back into the single-player swing, but Return to Arkham available, and Arkham Knight will be 10 years old this June. (WB Montreal, who produced Arkham Origins, helped to Squads development and recently cut staffas done Rocksteady shortly after.) In June, sources said Bloomberg Rocksteady’s immediate future is helping put together a director’s cut in 2023’s Hogwarts Legacy, then… we don’t know, but it’s likely 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 not answering it. For now, wouldn’t the studio be better served to step out of the Batman hole and tackle another DC hero? ago Squads release, various (and later denied) the rumors say that Rocksteady is making a Superman game, and in the high points of this game, its recreation of Metropolis is considered very good. And if not the Man of Steel, literally any hero who isn’t Wonder Woman will do at this point. Currently, this team has 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.

On the other hand, Rocksteady might do well to break out of the DC cage entirely and do its own thing. So far, its only non-DC game is its debut title, 2006’s Urban Unrest: Response to Riot. Something new might have to be the direction to follow Knight, but this is as good an opportunity as any to move on. Return to Arkham once again can only make things weirder than when we knew it was canon in the games. Making the team spend years and millions of dollars creating a single-player apologetic isn’t the best use of anyone’s time, and it’s not like we’re never getting another Bat-game eventually. For all that people fear about Insomniac becoming a Marvel game engine, that’s what happened to Rocksteady, which is clearly full of talented people who should get a chance to spread their wings. Recently, Bad Dog and Ryu Ga Gatoku It’s been teased for their first new properties in years, and I’m curious to see what Rocksteady can do outside the confines of a popular comic book property. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what an original sci-fi, horror, western, or any other game from this team would look like?

In a just world, Suicide Squad to get out on better, less compromising terms, or at least, Rocksteady won’t lose the bill for it. Like, we can only hope that WB and its leadership will just let the game studio figure out what it wants to do with what it does best, and cook from there. Other studios have recovered from worse, but the ability to walk away from less than stellar titles isn’t a given for every developer these days, and that could be a full-circle moment for one team that has built up a lot of goodwill so far.

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