Suicide Squad
Rock Steady/Doctor Report
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has struggled with its marketing campaign from the beginning, and that continued Friday with streams featuring big-name content creators like DrLupo, Shroud, and Tarik.
Things could have been better.
The idea was that these talented shooter players were meant to demonstrate the endgame of Suicide Squad. However, as a sponsored stream, there seems to have been little time to actually prepare so far, and through no fault of their own, players have learned that Shroud can overcharge his jetpack to travel faster. I often struggled with basic systems that I didn't know about. I mean, he was crawling all the time.
At another point, Poison Ivy disappeared from the cutscenes she was in, showing off a nice bug to the thousands of people who were giving the gameplay fairly mixed reviews in chat. There have been consistent complaints about how cluttered and chaotic the UI is, and this has been raised frequently since the beginning.
For what it's worth, at least some interesting information has been revealed about Endgame itself, including Elseworlds missions in another dimension, Endgame armor sets for build synergies, and the Infinite Paragon system. However, it feels like the preparation for a stream like this simply wasn't there, and these players should have been given more time to familiarize themselves with the game's core systems. But by the end, they felt like they had gotten the hang of it more.
It's really weird that all the positive marketing over the past year has allowed alpha players with NDAs to talk freely about the game. It was a much better preview than when they sent out gaming journalists and YouTubers for technical explanations. The preview was broken for just a few hours. Now they've tried a traditional sponsored broadcast with a celebrity, but it's garnered more negativity than anything else.
My sense of Suicide Squad at this point is that it's a game that could be pretty fun to get your hands on, and the base campaign could be fun too. But marketing is marketing for a reason, and there's good reason to expect poor marketing to be the gateway to lower initial sales and reputation. Plus, this is a live service, so it doesn't just have to be “pretty good”, it has to be actively good to keep people playing. So far I'm getting very strong Avengers vibes from all of this. While the game may actually be quite fun in parts, it suffers from lackluster marketing and ultimately falls apart as a live service and is considered a failure.
As a hardcore looter, I really want Suicide Squad to be great, but it's clear that it needs to be about 100 times better than its previous marketing campaign.
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