While Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League faced quite a bit of criticism following its release, its development wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either. In an interview with Bloomberg, two developers who worked on the title – Axel Rydby and Johnny Armstrong – have spoken about the tumultuous time. They noted that things got bad enough that they considered leaving the games industry altogether.
The duo has also confirmed that many of the game design decisions that went into Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League essentially came down to executives telling the developers how much money could be made from the title. Rydby, who would go on to become the director of the project, mentioned frequent meetings with executives where questions like “How many players can we reach with this feature?” or “How can we twist this design into something that can be more replayable?” were asked. This, he noted, was when he stopped feeling like he was making a game.
“That’s when I started feeling like I wasn’t making games anymore,” he said. “I was following a spreadsheet, some elusive marketing-analysis spreadsheet that no one could present clearly. I kind of felt like this isn’t the gaming industry I wanted to work in.”
Armstrong described a feeling of relief at Rocksteady that the studio wasn’t going to work on yet another Batman game. However, this relief wouldn’t last long.
“There was definitely a sense when we first moved on to it — arrogance is the wrong word, but a confidence,” he said. “We’re coming back off hit after hit. Of course we’ll be able to do this.”
Rocksteady’s lack of experience with multiplayer games also played a major role. Armstrong described a feeling of the team needing “to run to stand still” due to a lack of noticeable improvement in the game despite plenty of hours being spent on it. The number of delays didn’t help either, since they were relatively short-term delays that combined into a longer one. This meant that the developers couldn’t make any plans for introducing major overhauls to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League that could actually improve it.
“Six months isn’t enough to do any fundamental changes,” Rydby said. “That’s just enough to just fix as many bugs as you can and see if you can squeeze in a bit of feature tweaks here and there.”
With the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and its subsequent negative reception, Warner Bros. ultimately decided to abandon the title. Armstrong noted that this was the moment when he felt “everything drained” from him. “I said, ‘I can’t do this again. I don’t know if I’m done with the industry, but I’m done.’ I could feel myself coming apart at the seams.”
Rydby and Armstrong would ultimately leave Rocksteady, and while catching up with each other, would ultimately decide to make a new game together. This led to the development of a prototype that would then go on to become the Kickstarter project Secret of Circadia. The experience with Suicide Squad as a whole has left a sour taste in Rydby’s mouth, however.
“I think as an industry we are severely losing our way,” Rydby said. “It used to be passion projects that you loved and hoped other people loved too. When they did, it was such an amazing feeling. It became less and less of that. It became: ‘Let’s hope it sells. Let’s hope we get money from it.’”
