Just Let Us Play the Full Game

A couple of recent video game releases have stuck out to me. We had Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which has been met by the general indifference of the game public, and then Skull & Bones, a game based on the pirate sailing portions of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, which took ten years of development to come out and, also, has been generally ignored by gamers. In both cases the games seem to be fighting to be the next big “live service title”, a term meaning gaming companies expect you to just keep playing on and on, even after you’ve gone through the main game content, just to see what’s next as each new season of gameplay comes out. You don’t stop playing games, you become part of them.

Of course, Ubisoft is also the company that said you don’t own the games you buy, so maybe don’t listen to corporate speak on how you’re supposed to play games.

These aren’t the only live service titles that have come out, of course. You can trace these games back to Anthem and Destiny and Diablo III, which in turn got their ideas from MMOs like Everquest, EVE Online, and World of Warcraft, as well as drawing ideas from player-vs-player battle arenas in first-person shooters. Anything that keeps gamers coming back, that can be monetized to leech money out of pockets while gamers keep chugging in hours, is something game companies are going to notice. With that said, not all the games in these genre are good, and all the evidence seems to indicate that Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones are both already on thin ice and might not see the expected seasonal updates players were promised.

Video games are a business and I don’t fault companies for trying to find ways to make money in the industry. As consoles have gotten more powerful, graphics better, gameplay more intricate, companies have had to spend more and more money on their Triple-A titles to get them out the door and into the waiting public’s hands. It’s expected they’ll charge for the game itself, and that’s fair. If you’re playing an MMO then you have an expected monthly cost to play (although many of those have ditched monthly costs over the years). There’s often some kind of in-game economy for you to invest in and use to buy upgrades. And sometimes you can buy loot, gear, and skins for the game as well, all as viable revenue streams for the companies to use.Your thoughts on how good or bad these revenue streams may be is certainly up for debate (I fall on the side against many of the more predator ways companies make money, like loot boxes), but game companies do need to make money to stay open, at the very minimum.

Issues come, though, when the corporate overlords dictate a game has to be out at a certain time, in a certain genre, to suit corporate needs, without consideration towards if the game is actually going to be good, or if it will suit the needs of the players. It feels like, in the case of Suicide Squad and Skull & Bones, the needs and wants of the players were cast aside so the suits up top could make a little extra in their stocks. Or, at least that was the plan and, well, plans didn’t work out as expected for these two titles.

In the case of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the pedigree for the game was there. The title was developed by Rocksteady Studios, the company behind most of the Batman: Arkham games (all the good ones, at least). This game takes place in the Arkham world and sees the Suicide SquadA team of villans forced to work together to do heroic things, the Suicide Squad is a team that works because of their darker motivations (and the fact that the team rotates in large part because they aren't expected to come back time and again). going after the heroes of the Justice LeagueThe premiere team at DC Comics, their version of the Avengers (which actually came before the Avengers and, really, has existed in some fomr since the early 1940s), the Justice League is the team-up to end all team-ups, featuring some of the most popular, and longest running, characters in all of comics history (and also Booster Gold). after Brainiac comes down to Earth and takes over the minds of all the heroes. The squad has to, quite literally, kill the Justice League to save the planet, which is quite an interesting concept. When you consider that it’s in the same universe as all those other games, that means you’re literally playing as anti-heroes taking out the BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen. you played as through three mainline titles (and a bunch of spin-offs). That’s bold, for sure.

The game, however, is nowhere near as bold. Despite the diversity of characters – Harley QuinnCreated to serve as "Joker's Girlfriend" as well as his primary minion for Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn quickly grew to be one of the most popular characters of that show, eventually finding a solid life beyond the cartoon in comics, movies, and media., Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, and King Shark as the first set of playable characters (with more villains expected to be added if Rocksteady is given the money to finish their planned seasons before the plug is pulled on this title) – the game is a pretty basic looter-shooter. While Deadshot is a character that makes sense participating in a looter-shooter since, you know, he’s known for his shooting, the other characters are not. A gun seems silly in King Shark’s hands, for example, and Harley is far more known for using baseball bats, giant hammers, and other comically silly melee weapons than guns. Hell, where in Captain Boomerang’s description do you see “guns”? He literally is the master of boomerangs.

The generic feel extends to the gameplay as well. You run around, shooting guys and collecting gear, all so you can complete missions to then go to the next mission and do it all again. Place to place, mission to mission, very often doing the same things each time. Go on a mission to shoot guys, then go on a mission to defend a spot by shooting guys, then get assigned to protect a moving target by shooting guys. This is all you do, over and over, until the game ends, with little in the way of real plot holding it together, just promises that if you do this enough times then, eventually, you get to fight one hero or another until all of the Justice League is dead.

Except, even for as threadbare as that plot is, it doesn’t even finish in the main game. No, they reserve that for the live service seasons, where you get to spend more time doing the same things except now you’re taking out the various parts of Brainiac over the course of who knows how many seasons all told. The game, in essence, isn’t even done and you can’t finish it until Rocksteady does. Is it any wonder players have already started tuning out?

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the gameplay in shooters is all about shooting. I love the BorderlandsConceptually, Borderlands is Mad Max but set on an alien planet, with magic. The game play might be action-shooter-RPG fare, with a bit of Diablo thrown in, but the aesthetic is pure, Australian post-apocalyptic exploitation. games and those are all about going to a place and shooting dudes and then doing it again elsewhere. But there was variety, not only in the guns and characters (which did work very different and had a lot of diversity) but also in a long story. It might have always had the best writing but it had a lot going on, so much more than Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. Considering the world they had and the characters they could play with, the results are tragic.

The game feels like it was rushed out to meet the needs of Rocksteady’s corporate daddy. “We need this game, it has to be live-service, and you have to get it done by this date.” So they took what they had, made a few basic missions, turned the characters into basic swaps of each other, and then put the game out when it was “done” just to get it done. Maybe the team cared, maybe they wanted it to be good, but the rushed production and redundant gameplay shows that Rocksteady either didn’t know how to make a good looter-shooter or just wasn’t able to within the bounds of their contract. Again, tragic.

Meanwhile, Skull & Bones is a game no one asked for. While the Suicide Squad has fans, I have to wonder who was sitting there going, “man, I really want another Ubisoft pirate game like Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag but with nothing about assassins thrown in.” Perhaps if the company had gotten the game out a year or two after Black Flag came out to capitalize on the success, either as an expansion or a short, twenty buck game, then it would have been appreciated by fans. Certainly a game like that could have hit the market at the right time and the right way to be a viable product.

Instead, Ubisoft took ten years to make the game, putting out something that, after all that time, plays like a worse version of a small slice of a larger, older, far more beloved game. All for what? Maybe a day of gameplay in a single player mode before you get dumped into the open waters of the live service game so you can run missions with other players (when no one is playing the game at this point) or battle against other players (when, again, the game is a ghost town). Oh, and to do this you have to pay 70 bucks because, as per Ubisoft, this is “the first Quadruple-A game”.

The reason the single-player portion is so short is because it’s just a tutorial for the “real” game, which is the live service open world area. And that is designed, supposedly, to keep you playing and keep you spending money on perks and skins and upgrades. But what’s the point of any of that if most of the good content is locked away in seasons or all the perks and upgrades don’t mean dick if there’s no one else playing around you? Would have been better to put out a fleshed out first person game where you could go pirate missions and land party missions and visit towns and… oh, wait, we just reinvented Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.

I want to emphasize again that I’m not necessarily against the concept of live service modes in games. I loved Diablo III and enjoyed playing through its seasons when they came out, at least for a few of them. I did eventually get bored, but that was after a handful of seasons and plenty of hours dumped into the game, and that was after I spent months playing and replaying through the main game. The experience was great, and the game kept me hooked with its deep single player experience that then led to some fun seasonal adventures. That’s how it should be done: give us the full game, let us enjoy ourselves, and then once we’re hooked into the world then provide the live service as the, “and now hang around and kill things…”

What Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Skull & Bones are lacking is the single player experience that gives us the hours of content to reel us in. These games (and so many like them) instead provide a simple, threadbare experience with the promise of more to come down the road. That’s tucking half (or more) of the game in expansions instead of letting players play the game they paid for up front. Companies have decided that live service means “the first taste is full price, and then we’ll maybe give you the rest of the game if you play long enough.” There’s no guarantee players are going to stick with either of these titles long enough that the rest of the game they paid for arrives. That hurts the players, and it hurts the industry as a whole.

Already a number of companies are considering killing their live service projects, but there are plenty more in development. Last number I saw was close to 600 live service games being developed. Even if half of them get canceled, that’s a lot of games expecting players to come in and spend hours in their half-baked experiences for the promise of more to come. That’s not fun, and that a shit way to run a business. Hopefully this trend ends much sooner than later but… well… no one has ever accused game companies of being smart.