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Rocksteady Studios is Looking to Return to Batman for a Single-Player Game

Kacho

Gold Member
At just a bit over a year before release, though? I see one being the creative director and the other being the studio head up until late 2022, and I see no better people to blame (within Rocksteady, ofc) for the utter mess that was Suicide Squad. Rocksteady may be just a name right now, but not during (most of, if you want to go that way) the development of Suicide Squad.
Those guys delivered excellent single player games for years and then everything goes to shit right around the time WB starts putting out a bunch live service stinkers. Look at WB Games now. They’re in shambles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they left the studio. The lack of passion in Suicide Squad shows.

Sony was about to do the same thing with their single player studios, but they were able to cancel most of the games.
 

HJuggernaut

Member
jbareham_210528_1106_batman.jpg
 

Shubh_C63

Member
Not that I seriously care about Rocksteady, but I checked a bit the credits of Batman: Arkham Knight on MobyGames and the results were... interesting.
Are these mostly assumptions due to the gulf of quality between both games? Because literally everyone here -bar Adam Doherty and Francesco Coan- still worked on Suicide Squad, and with key roles at that.
WSLUo7W.png

Obviously this isn't the entire development team (because I didn't check on the rest), but these being some of the most important staff that worked on Arkham Shadow, including the actual game director going on to be the creative director on Suicide Squad, is interesting, as I previously said.
Which names were those who left and made Hundered.Stars game company ?
Were they actually at important positions.
 

nashman

Member
EA when SP Veilgaurd does below expectation "we need more Gaas like games"

RS when Gass does below expectation "we need to back to SP"

How bout make a great game regardless of genre? No Politics. Just a great game please.
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Their reasoning was “exciting new opportunities” or something to that effect. Doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. I’m sure they took talent with them too.

Those guys delivered excellent single player games for years and then everything goes to shit right around the time WB starts putting out a bunch live service stinkers. Look at WB Games now. They’re in shambles. I don’t think it’s a coincidence they left the studio. The lack of passion in Suicide Squad shows.
No, Suicide Squad was literally their fault, and the fact that you're saying this shows that their sleight of hand has worked.

Before they landed on Suicide Squad, they spent 2 years twiddling their thumbs with another live service MP puzzle game called stones. They were the ones who wanted to make DC-skinned Warframe Destiny and chose the Suicide Squad as the team they would use. They mismanaged the development of the game, not having any idea how to make a Destiny wannabe.
 

Kacho

Gold Member
No, Suicide Squad was literally their fault, and the fact that you're saying this shows that their sleight of hand has worked.

Before they landed on Suicide Squad, they spent 2 years twiddling their thumbs with another live service MP puzzle game called stones. They were the ones who wanted to make DC-skinned Warframe Destiny and chose the Suicide Squad as the team they would use. They mismanaged the development of the game, not having any idea how to make a Destiny wannabe.
Their “sleight of hand.” Lol give me a break…

WB shares plenty of blame for Suicide Squad. They wanted an endless cash generator like all publishers do. They’ve been pressuring their studios to deliver stuff like that for years, which is why we got Suicide Squad and moronic MTX in Monolith’s Shadow of War. There’s even rumors WB want Hogwarts 2 to be a live service.

Who knows what the hell Wonder Woman was supposed to be, what it is now, or what’s going on over at Monolith.

Edit: Gotham Knights too according to Grubb. I guess WB Montreal were given mercy by WB.
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nordique

Member
man, it better be good. Batman is My fav super hero. Loved the arkham games.

2 things:

I miss kevin conroy.

and im passing on the game if mrs freeze is still a thing.
 

Branded

Member
No one of the old Rocksteady is still there plus... do the people who remain not want to spice things up with something else other than superhero shit?

I mean I love the Arkham games but we've had 4 of those already and that's not even counting all the other side stuff.
 

Perrott

Member
Which names were those who left and made Hundered.Stars game company ?
Were they actually at important positions.
Most of them, but the point is that all of them - leads and directors across the whole Arkham trilogy - were there calling the shots on Suicide Squad from day one and up until late 2022, meaning that the Suicide Squad that we saw extensive gameplay of at the early 2023 State of Play was the game that the creators of the Batman: Arkham series had been working on for the past six years up to that point. They only quit once the game was fully done and in the debugging phase.

Don't forget that, prior to picking up the Suicide Squad project, Rocksteady had been prototyping a cooperative multiplayer new IP centered around puzzle-solving ever since Arkham Knight came out and in parallel to Batman: Arkham VR. So multiplayer was already in their minds the whole time, all WB did was suggest to slap one of their licenses to it.
 
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samoilaaa

Member
Are the staff behind the classic Arkham games still there?
thats the important question , they way games are being made today its getting harder and harder to get excited

man i miss the early 2005-2014 period , when a game was announced the developers would talk about the actual features of a game , what makes it fun

now all you see is PR interviews about inclusion , how their game has black/lgbtq/women characters like is some kind of celebration and expect people to buy the game just because they included those categories of people , one example is alan wake 2 early interview when they said that they feel proud about including a black woman as a main character , seriously ?

I just want to be happy about games again in a more simple way and see devs just try make the best game they can , try to innovate , try to impress the player with cool features
 

Doom85

Member
Shrugs GIF


On the one hand, I’m ready to move on from Batman games for now after four within the same series, any other DC hero would be more interesting at this point. But I suppose it would be in the best interest to build back some goodwill, so let’s start back at basics, I suppose, I just have no hype for this.
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Their “sleight of hand.” Lol give me a break…

WB shares plenty of blame for Suicide Squad. They wanted an endless cash generator like all publishers do. They’ve been pressuring their studios to deliver stuff like that for years, which is why we got Suicide Squad and moronic MTX in Monolith’s Shadow of War. There’s even rumors WB want Hogwarts 2 to be a live service.

Who knows what the hell Wonder Woman was supposed to be, what it is now, or what’s going on over at Monolith.

Edit: Gotham Knights too according to Grubb. I guess WB Montreal were given mercy by WB.
.

So you just don't have any clue what you're talking about as it pertains to this story.

Around the end of 2016, Walker and Hill told their staff there’d been a change of plans. Stones was out. Suicide Squad was in. According to people who attended the meetings, Hill explained that he saw it as a better opportunity than making something new from scratch and that the company hoped to release the game in 2019 or 2020. (Walker and Hill declined requests to be interviewed for this story.
...
Over time, the leaders’ vision kept morphing, most notably switching from an emphasis on melee combat to heavily focusing on guns. The change left some staff members wondering why protagonists such as Captain Boomerang, known for fighting with his namesake weapon, would suddenly pivot to gunplay.
...
Staff members sometimes waited weeks or months for Hill, the studio’s perfectionist co-founder and director of the game, to review their work, said the people familiar, creating a bottleneck that further slowed development. He scrapped big chunks of the script and struggled to convey his evolving ideas, they said, confessing that he hadn’t spent much time with competing games such as Destiny. The constant delays hurt morale and led staff to fret that they were discarding too much and failing to make real progress.

Wonder Woman, meanwhile, was explicitly revealed as a single player story driven game in 2021. It remains so, only now without the Nemesis system.

The single player open-world action game will introduce an original story set in the DC Universe and allow players to become Diana of Themyscira in the fight to unite her Amazon family and the humans from the modern world.
Powered by the Nemesis System, gamers will forge deep connections with both enemies and allies as they progress from a heroic fighter into a proven leader.



And for the man-jaw assoomers here, she's designed to be attractive.

An initial version of Wonder Woman tried reimagining the Nemesis system with the game’s namesake heroine befriending enemies, but that idea has since been tossed out in favor of a more traditional action-adventure game. Now, Wonder Woman’s fate remains in question, according to the people familiar with the business, because of challenges following the changes in Monolith’s leadership and issues surrounding the game’s technology.
 

Kerotan

Member
If they managed to pull off a batman like the ps3 era ones I might actually support them with a year one purchase. Only ever bought one of them on a fire sale. Doubt they will though.
 

Kacho

Gold Member
So you just don't have any clue what you're talking about as it pertains to this story.



Wonder Woman, meanwhile, was explicitly revealed as a single player story driven game in 2021. It remains so, only now without the Nemesis system.





And for the man-jaw assoomers here, she's designed to be attractive.



Yes, I'm aware of Jason Schreier's article. That's nothing more than gossip from bitter employee's with an axe to grind.

Walker and HIll leaving Rocksteady with a bunch of talent is bad for the studio. I look forward to seeing what they can produce now that they're no longer under control of WB Games. WB has been mismanaging the fuck out of their studios in recent years.
 
Arkham Asylum, albeit smaller, was the best of the trilogy. City was still good, but Knight was the worst in the series. Killing off the best villian that largely carries the cast of rogues in the batman universe in the 2nd game was a mistake. It was a certainly a brave path to take story wise, but it basically backed them into a corner for the future games of losing the one character that makes the batman universe tick. Without the Joker, there is no batman. Unless they just go for some sort of reboot.
 

ProtoByte

Weeb Underling
Yes, I'm aware of Jason Schreier's article. That's nothing more than gossip from bitter employee's with an axe to grind.
I have my problems with Schreier, and you sometimes get that sense, especially from his early crunch exposes about Naughty Dog and even BioWare.

But this isn't gossip. This is a comprehensive breakdown of facts. There's no vagueness or innuendo here, or allegations of "inappropriate behaviour" that then result in a counter-lawsuit.

It's just common sense. Hill and Walker stick around for 7 and a half years after Arkham Knight, and you think that their leaving means that they don't bear most of the blame despite being the heads of WB's top studio. Yes, you fell for the sleight of hand. It's even worse that you read both those articles and still come to this conclusion.

If Schreier could've thrown the blame on higher executives, he would've.

Walker and HIll leaving Rocksteady with a bunch of talent is bad for the studio. I look forward to seeing what they can produce now that they're no longer under control of WB Games. WB has been mismanaging the fuck out of their studios in recent years.
Sure it is, two things can be true at once. But the idea that them staying would've meant a definite win isn't the case. Developers can actually lose the plot over their careers. We've seen many cases of "star talent" leaving and starting up their own studios away from the major publishers. I do not believe it has worked once so far.
 
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Astray

Member
I love Sefton Hill, but let's get real, Suicide Squad was his baby just as much as it is WH execs.

No sane WB exec would suggest killing off Batman in any game, they had to be convinced of it somehow.
 
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