The narrative about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been spinning away from Rocksteady for quite some time now.
First, it revealed itself as a co-op, live-service looter shooter in the vein of Marvel’s Avengers, which was received negatively. Then, there was a gameplay showcase that turned many off further followed shortly by a lengthy delay. Now, a plot summary of the game just leaked leading many fans to freak out about various developments.
Disaster, right? Well, maybe not. Maybe not if Rocksteady just let people play the game before its January 30 release date.
The story stuff, that ship may have flown as you can’t really correct that now. But since those leaks were published, the original leaker has revealed they regretted doing it and blatantly mischaracterized or made up parts of it, and other leakers in the know says it’s a lot different than what was incorrectly summarized.
But the game? There’s been one positive story out of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League these past months, and the problem is that it’s buried under the NDA of a Closed Alpha.
That Closed Alpha kicked off on November 30, and did indeed require its participants to share nothing about the game, lest they face legal action. That’s not where the story leaks came from, but what did leak was a surprising amount of positive feedback.
The most common sentiment amongst players that were speaking out about their time with the game was that they were surprised at how much they liked it, or that it totally reversed their opinion about the game and they were now excited for it. Or they even went so far as to pre-order it.
I haven’t played the game, but I know that if reactions were that positive to the Closed Alpha, an Open Beta seems like exactly what Suicide Squad needs if it does have faith in its own gameplay and it does produce this kind of reaction from a larger audience.
Sure, it could backfire, these people could be self-selecting in that if you want to play the Closed Alpha to the point where you sign up for it, you might be predisposed to like the game more than most. But the reaction is mainly that many minds have been changed, and that Rocksteady has once again hit the right notes with gameplay like they did with Arkham, albeit in a bouncy action shooter rather than its block and parry combo combat of Arkham, which went on to be emulated by many games after.
I don’t know if any more trailers or deep dives into its story or post-launch live content are going to shift the narrative here in the next month. If this is the type of game that you have to play to experience what’s so good about it then…let players play. Otherwise, I’m not so sure you’re going to like what launch numbers turn out to be.
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