Alarm bells are no doubt going off at Rocksteady as they try to pull any amount of players back into Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And the plan for that appears to be steamrolling ahead to get its Joker season out in March like they originally planned, even if fixes and balances the game needs may fall by the wayside.
In a new blog post, Rocksteady says that yes, the plan is still to get Suicide Squad’s Joker season, which was previewed before the game even went live, out in March. Likely in its second half, but in order to do that, they are skipping balance patches the game currently needs.
Previously, Rocksteady announced that they were going to be nerfing some of its most annoying enemies and enemy modifiers. They’re also saying they’re nerfing Braniac in his fight as well.
But yes, not happening yet. From a blog yesterday: “We’re excited to get those changes into the game, and we’re hard at work getting them ready. Our main focus right now is getting the whole game ready to receive our free Season 1 Update this month, which includes the new playable character Joker, as well as new gear, environments, and more. As a result we won’t be releasing a patch next week as we dedicate ourselves to testing fixes and making sure they’re ready for implementation.”
Of course, the more pressing issue are online connection issues and mastery bugs that have prevented many players from playing for weeks, if not since the game launched. They say they are still working on those issues and they wouldn’t necessarily have to be in a patch. They still say they are “investigating fixes” for the most major issues in this category with login, matchmaking and mastery.
I think Suicide Squad is trying to avoid falling into a frequent live service trap where bugs and balance problems are so severe that they push back promised live content until its all fixed. That happened with both Anthem and Avengers and while Suicide Squad is no doubt trying to avoid that fate, I’m not sure releasing Joker and all his attached content before severe issues with the game are resolved is going to go over well among the already dwindling player population.
The main issue they probably see is that plummeting playercount, and the idea is that Joker will bring people back. I am skeptical of that, and as I said in a recent article, I simply don’t think this game is going to last the year and get out all its planned content, given how poorly it has been performing.
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