Leak Reveals ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League’ Has A Battle Pass

Suicide Squad

Rocksteady

When talking about the biggest games of 2023, Starfield, Redfall, Final Fantasy XVI, Hogwarts Legacy, Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom, there’s one game that doesn’t seem to come up all that often. That would be Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is the next game from the main Rocksteady team responsible for the core trilogy of Arkham games.

But there does feel like there’s something of a lack of buzz for Suicide Squad, perhaps because we’re on SS overload after two movies, one good one bad, both of which failed at the box office. Perhaps because we haven’t been shown all that much from the game, and what we have been shown…well, it’s not Arkham.

Now there appears to be a new point of concern. A leaked screenshot from a test build of Suicide Squad on 4chan, verified by VGC, shows that the single player/co-op game will have a battle pass attached to it, which has elicited a collective groan from the gaming community.

While it’s said that the battle pass contains cosmetics, that’s not really the point. If you start putting things like cosmetic outfits for a game like this in a battle pass, you eliminate one of the more welcome parts of games like Arkham and Spider-Man, the ability to earn all outfits in-game through various achievements. Some sort of paid XP track to grind out unlocks over time feels…not great for a game like this.

Some are saying this means Suicide Squad is a games-as-service offering, but it’s not quite clear yet. The existence of one battle pass implies the potential existence of future battle passes, which would indeed be a GaaS system. But I also don’t think Suicide Squad is meant to be going full Marvel’s Avengers here either, a game that has live content updates, battle passes for each new character, and a paid store shop full of cosmetic skins. But a battle pass alone is enough to shoot up a few warning flags for fans here.

It would probably be wise for Rocksteady to start talking about things like this to get ahead of the narrative, rather than leaving things to fans’ imaginations. We have heard weirdly little about the game for a while now since its delay out of fall 2022, and last we heard, it’s supposed to be out in spring 2023, though we have no actual release date yet. A somewhat related project, Gotham Knights, was also delayed but did come out last year. That game does have its fans, but generally did not review great. It also didn’t have any GaaS elements, although it did have a loot grind and a famously ugly UI, something that Suicide Squad also seems like it may have, judging by this new shot.

I think there have been many fears from the start that Suicide Squad simply was not the project many people wanted to see as Rocksteady’s next outing after Arkham. Many fans were hoping for something like a Batman Beyond game or a Superman game from the studio who had proven they can make great superhero offerings. Instead, we have a multiplayer, co-op Suicide Squad game with a battle pass. Not to say it can’t be good, but I understand the skepticism. And it would be good to get some answers from Rocksteady sooner rather than later.

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