Triple Click - Suicide Squad: Kill The Live Service Games

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

The Triple Click gang takes a look at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the latest game from Rocksteady Studios and a new entry into the oversaturated "live service" market. They talk about why publishers love service games, superhero fatigue, and how this new Suicide Squad game came to be.One More Thing:Kirk: Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2024) (Amazon Prime)Maddy: True Detective S2 (HBO)Jason: Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment (Jason Schreier)LINKS:Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

There's only one group of superheroes that I want to play a video game as, and they're called Kirk Hamilton, Maddie Myers, and Jason Schreier. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we are talking about Suicide Squad, the new game from Rocksteady Studios, a live service game, and a looter shooter. Let's dig into it. I'm Jason Schreier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello. Hey. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. my friends. Welcome back to another episode of Triple Click. Another one. The listener supported podcast where we are only able to get on a microphone

and hop on Skype and record our audio files and send them to Kirk for editing and then transmute them into a podcast for your listening ear capabilities. I don't know. We're only able to do that because of all of you fine folks out there. We are not supported by ads. We are a subscription podcast. So please help us make the show possible. Go to maximum fun.org

slash join, become a max fun member, part of our network, and you will help us support the show. And also get access to our monthly bonus episodes, including some recent ones on Baldersgate 3, and our most recent one, which I believe we published last week, about the best things that are not games of 2023, all of our favorite podcasts and shows and movies and music and lots. whatnot. Are we going to say what we're going to record this coming month for the bonus, Jason? Oh, do we know yet? Do we deserve to say what it is? Oh, Scorsese. Yes, we're doing a, so at the end of February, we are doing a Scorsese cast for our bonus episode. The three of us are going to watch Goodfellas, Casino, and the Wolf of Wall Street, all by Marty Scorsese.

And we are going to talk about those three movies and how they play off each other. That'll be super fun. So that'll be the February bonus up. Okay, Maddie, what are we talking about this week? This week we are talking about Suicide Squad, kill the Justice League, but also team-based superhero games, but also looters shooters as a genre fad that has been going on since 2009, but also the other genre fad that is games as a service, also known as live service games. This podcast will be 500 hours before. No, it won't. No, it won't because this is a very specific discussion where we could actually just talk about suicide squad, the game Marvel's Avengers, the game Guardians of the Galaxy, and also the game Gotham Knights. And that would be a show in and of itself because the three of us have played those games and they are ghosts of one another and also.

ghosts of these two trends in AAA video game development. But playing Suicide Squad, I just, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling that sensitive pressure on my shoulders that these game developers must have felt putting together all of these disparate elements into a AAA experience. But let me, let me zoom out Jason's style and describe what Suicide Squad is. So this is a game that's been a development for years. It got delayed a couple of times. I remember there was a very specific trailer in spring of last year, 2003, where the Suicide Squad game was shown off at I believe a state of play. It's a four character, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, and King Shark. You play as one of them and three of your friends join you, or you can control all three. And in this trailer,

in the springtime. They also, the team at Rock City Studios, which made the game, Warner Bros. published it. They showed off a whole bunch of menu screens. Do you two remember this? We were just menus on menus. It was loot galore. It really took me back to 2009

when I was playing Borderlands 1. We got to see loot for Deadshot. We got to see loot for Harley Quinn. And then folks were responding to that by being really confused about why this game had so much loot in it. And then the game got delayed. And now here we are in 2024 playing this game.

And the result is a game that does have loot in it. It does also have a live service element. There's multiple seasons of content coming. There's a new upcoming season that will have the Joker in it that's going to launch in March 2024. And it also has a campaign that is very, very short. You can beat it in about nine hours or 12 hours if you're slow like me. And it is a hodgepodge of these different kinds of mechanics that we've seen in other kind of team-based superhero games. And the result is super strange. And at least for me personally, I don't think it hangs together.

And I really feel for the team that was working on it because I feel like a lot went into this. but I want to hear from you to about what you thought in playing this and how you felt as compared to when it was announced, when we saw the trailers, and how weird the journey has been to the looter-shooter-shooter decline. So, Jason, how much of Suicide Squad have you played? And what did you think about the live service and loot elements in the game? Yeah, I haven't played a ton because I got code for another highly anticipated game. That has taken up my time. But I was not super impressed. I mean, really, actually, I should say I was kind of impressed by the rock study of it all.

It felt like a genuine rock city game. Like you got your constant quips and your great animations and some really cool cinematic stuff. I really enjoyed that kind of opening prison sequence when they're all kind of going at it. And there's that slow-mo credits, a bunch of shots. It was really cool. And really playing that and playing around with kind of the weirdo mechanics with like shooting and traversal and stuff just made me think, man, I wish this was a single player game because the problem with it being multiplayer is that all of the design has to account for that.

So there's a lot of just kind of you're hanging out on a rooftop shooting at waves of enemies with your buddies as opposed to the kind of handcrafted tailor made. Here we have some unique mechanics that you as a player will be. able to get through and try to solve this puzzle or figure out this, this sequence. And the other part, the other part of that equation is that they all use guns instead of having their special superhero abilities. I guess they kind of have parts of them as like part of their traversal and stuff, but, but for the most part, they're all shooting with guns, which again is part of the whole, like, we want this to be everyone. There has to be parity between the characters and you have to be

able to pick up guns and find them. And there has to be a loot chase so you can keep playing. And so on and so on. So it just really, it feels like a rock city goodness kind of marred by a lot of those trends that we're seeing. And we can get into the why and the kind of the oversaturation of it all a little bit later. But my initial impression is just like, man, I wish this was just kind of more like Guardians of the Galaxy where it was just a single player narrative game. Yeah. Before I go to Kirk, I actually want to respond to something you said that's a great point about the guns and how each of the characters feels different than you might. might expect. So heading into this game, I just assumed I was going to play as Harley Quinn the

whole time because I love Harley Quinn. I love the Birds of Prey movie. I like the HBO show. And normally Harley Quinn, and pretty much every piece of media where she appears, including the comic books, has a huge hammer that she hits people with. That's like her whole deal of life. But not so in this game. In this game, she's stolen all of Batman's tech. So she's got like a little bat drone that flies above her and she uses like kind of this grappling hook mechanic to swing from place to place and like leap over walls. So she's kind of like a Spider-Man character and she's got these pistols. So she kind of feels like a run and gun character as opposed to the melee character I expected. And it just didn't feel right at all. But I understand exactly why it happened

because every character needs to be able to pick up endless guns and have that loop continue where you're just continually picking up pistols in the case of Harley. But Kirk, as somebody who's played a lot of the Arkham games in particular, this is technically canon with those games, and that Batman is in here, and you've got to kill him like the title says. So where are you landing on this?

I don't know. It's pretty weird. I haven't played that much either. I played a few hours, the opening. a few sequences. I got up to where I was running around the open world doing side stuff, shooting lots of dudes, felt kind of like playing Sunset Overdrive, felt a little like playing that Guardians of the Galaxy game. And I was like, I don't know. I might play through this for this story, but I'm not super feeling it. Then I went and reinstalled Batman Arkham Knight from 2015 and played the first couple hours of that, or maybe hour of that, just to remind myself

how that game felt and how that game opened. And I was actually really struck by the differences between the two. It's a pretty remarkably different experience and not just because you know, Arkham Knight obviously isn't a looter shooter. It isn't a co-op game. It is just a much more self-assured, confident, and distinct game. Arkham Knight, that is. Suicide Squad feels derivative in a lot of different ways. And while I agree that it has some really great performances, clearly their animation team are really good, the facial animations, the characters look great, as good performance as the actors. But it's not nearly on the level of Arkham Knight.

When you start Arkham Night, the very first thing that happens in Arkham Night is this slow zoom up where you're not even sure what you're seeing. It's playing Frank Sinatra singing, I've got you under my skin. And then you realize that you're staring at the dead face of the Joker who's just sitting there. And then nothing happens for a while. And you realize you have to press the button to ignite the incinerator that burns his body because you're actually Jim Gordon burning the Joker who died in the game before.

That's how Arkham Knight begins. And then from there, it's like, you're this other character. There's a fear gas attack stuff goes crazy. You're like, are a cop who kills civilians. The city is evacuated. The camera is like swooping left and right. It like goes all through the city and then pulls up to Batman who's standing there overlooking the street. I mean, it is like wild playing it.

Even now, it's like more ambitious and impressive than, you know, I don't know, games that come out right now. Suicide Squad, at least for me, I mean, it's a little broken on PC. So, like, there's some weird transitions into and out of cutscenes and stuff. But it's just nowhere close. I mean, even charming sequences, like you described Jason, the freeze frame, the pop song. That just feels like Tales from the Borderlands to me or something. Like, a lot of the jokes feel like the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the slow-mo of them walking toward the camera, the person throwing a thing and hitting one of them and being like, hey, suicide squad, fuck you.

Also, who did that and why? It's all in service of these kind of derivative jokes that I've heard before. There are some funny lines. You know, like I said, Harley Quinn has a good line with Wonder Woman that made me crack up. But overall, I'm just like, okay, this feels pretty derivative and not that exciting, especially given how exciting this studio's previous games were. But that, I think, is the interesting thing about this game and what maybe brings us to our broader topic is this feels to me like a very identifiable point

in the lifespan of a video game studio. because you can follow the credits for the Arkham games and then the Suicide Squad game and you can see how they've changed over the years to run it down. Arkham Asylum came out in 2009. The best, Resties actually, our friends at the Besties,

they do their secondary podcast, the Resties, did a fun little timeline of this where they emphasized the fact that Arkham Asylum came out in 2009 and then Arkham City, its phenomenal sequel, came out in 2011. It came out two years later, which is totally wild.

People had a lot more tolerance for crunch at that point in the video. That could be. Yeah, that could be it. I don't really know what the process was for making it. But the timeline is pretty wild. 2011 for City, 2015 for night. And now here we are almost 10 years after that for suicide squad. So a huge, a huge increase in the development time.

So Paul Deany, a famous Batman writer, he wholly wrote Arkham Asylum, which a lot of people still say is the best one. Then he and Sefton Hill, one of the co-founders of Rocksteady, they co-wrote, and I think there was a third writer on that game. Then Arkham Knight, Paul Dini leaves, and Sefton Hill and someone else writes that game. I actually really like Arkham Knight, but it is pretty tonally different. It's a pretty severe game. I think it holds together overall, but that's probably a separate podcast. It's a very interesting game and somewhat provocative.

So that's Sefton Hill, and he directed all three of those games, all three directed by the same guy, who, of course, left Rocksteady with what's his name, Jamie Walker, the co-founder. they went and started their own studio fairly recently. So this narrative, you can kind of see this playing out, right? The way that they start and they're kind of just this upstart studio and they get this shot at making a Batman game. And whoa, it turns out really good. And then they hone their craft and kind of all the same people come together for Arkham City. And then they make something even bigger that's a little more tortured, a little harder to make in Arkham Knight.

And then the wheels just start to come off as it's like, okay, now we're the biggest thing going. We're super successful. We have to make something that's going to make Warner Brothers so much money. I'm sure they're getting all kinds of pressure from all kinds of angles, including self-imposed pressure to make this game that's going to be the biggest thing ever. And at all, the wheels kind of come off. And you can just see people have departed. This game was written by writers who didn't work on the first three games. It just increasingly has little to do with it.

And then you play it. And it's like, okay, this looks a little like Arkham. It kind of feels like it at times. But going back and playing Arkham Night, it's like, oh, yeah, this almost feels like, I don't know, it just feels like it was made by a completely different team. Let me just interject real quick to say that Sefton Hill and Jamie Walker, so they left in the fall of 2022. At that point, the game was supposed to come out in the spring of 2023. So they actually left, they had been steering the game for some five years before that. So it's worth noting here that Sefton Hill especially is kind of the creative director of the Arkham Games and was the creative director of this one as well.

So this wasn't a case of them leaving and other people kind of taking the man. for Suicide Squad. Yeah, I suppose I'm just looking at the credits and seeing multiple directors credited on Suicide Squad instead of just like Sefton Hill directing the game. I don't know what exactly that means. Right, because he left and then and then someone else came in and kind of steered it through to the finish line. But this game was conceived and like put together like and director for many years by the original founders of the studio. So I guess I would ask you, Jason, and since I know you hear things, do you know anything about the development of this game or the creative turns that it might have taken while they were working on it?

Yeah, I do. I mean, so the timeline here is 2015 Rock City Ships, Arkham Knight. They spend about a year then working on Arkham Knight VR. Oh, right. Or Arkham VR. And then at the same time, they start trying to spin out this new project, new IP type thing. I believe it was code named Stones. I think that was the name of it.

And that was supposed to be a multiplayer game. So they were playing around with that idea. And then what happened was Warner Brothers Montreal, which is kind of another Warner Brothers studio that actually helped Rock City work on an Arkham night and whatnot and did their own Arkham game, Arkham Origins. It's kind of seen as the Black Sheep of the series. And like Rock City won't acknowledge it. Though underrated, I would say.

It has its good qualities. Rock City did like an Arkham trilogy without acknowledging the existence of Arkham Origins. So Warner Brothers Montreal, they were working on two games. One was about Damien Wayne and the other was Suicide Squad. Both of those games would be canceled by like early 2017. And the Suicide Squad franchise got passed along to Rocksteady. And so Rocksteady started working on that, like 2017. But then didn't Montreal make Gotham Knights after that?

Yes. So basically they cancel both of those projects and then wound up working on Gotham Knights instead. So Suicide Squad has been in development of Rock City since 2017, and the concept was always like, hey, we're doing a multiplayer game. It wasn't like, hey, we're making a single-player game and then suddenly shoehorning multiplayer into it or anything like that. It was both from the beginning to be this. What I can't tell you is like, oh, who wanted to do, who made the call to do it this way? Because I think there are a lot of kind of competing pressures and ideas and decisions. and sometimes it's really actually pretty,

it's not as straightforward as like, oh, we wanted to do this, but Warner Brothers forced it to do this because sometimes it might be like, well, hey, I'm Mr. Publisher coming in, and I'm saying, and I don't know if this is what happened here necessarily, but this is usually what happens? Publisher comes in and says, hey, you guys,

what do you want to do for your next thing? And then the developer's like, oh, we want to do this. And the publisher is like, that sounds great. But hey, we have all these metrics showing that live service games, outperform, standard games, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if you do this, we'll give you a budget that is four times that you would get if you do a single player game. And then the creative decision makers might be like, hmm, well, then we can really get ambitious.

And those are like what the conversations are like a lot more often than Big Bad Publisher coming in and saying, hey, you have to do this or else you're fired or whatever. So I imagine that something similar probably happened here. Yeah. It's also interesting to think that Gotham Knights kind of emerged from a different version of Suicide Squad. I mean, I'm not saying that literally happened, but like to have a different multiplayer, four-person, DC Comics-based superhero team, where it kind of suffered from a similar sense of having a slightly empty feeling open world, certain kind of mission structure where there are very different ways that each mission feels to the point where it feels like a hodgepodge of different.

gameplay genres jumbled together. Like I remember Gotham Knights had like this detective mode where you were like putting clues together. There's nothing like that in Suicide Squad, but I'm just illustrating the point that there were a lot of different gameplay genres shoved into this one AAA experience that that also felt kind of identityless. And I was thinking about Gotham Knights a lot while I was playing this game. And it's almost too bad that these games were kind of developed concurrent.

and ended up in a similarly weird place of being identityless, especially given that they have some of the most famous and beloved characters of all time, whose identities we know better than any. And yet here we are with these games that feel like a collage of ideas, you know? Yeah, they also both exist in an interesting place related to the canon of the Arkham games, just because Gotham Knights, like, Batman Batman, like, Batman, and Suicide Squad from what I play,

it feels like it would have more comfortably fit in a multiversal setting. I know there is a multiverse in this game. That's like how Joker is coming back later or whatever in the DLC. In D.C., it's called Elseworld. Oh, sorry. You know what I mean? So I think it would have fit more comfortably there

where it's like, this is just for fun, this is silly, because you're going to kill all these beloved characters, which I know some people have reacted very negatively to. They were shocked. They saw a game. Kill the Justice League and they were like, wait a minute. I feel like that is kind of, it's edgy in a way that I enjoy. If you've, I mean, if you've even seen the Suicide Squad, the James Gunn Suicide Squad movie,

it's the kind of thing that they do all the time. It's like they just like totally murder Superman in front of you and it's kind of played for laughs. It's a little tougher when it's this specific Batman that people have played as for so long, especially because Arkham Knight, like the whole idea of Arkham Knight is from the drop. It's actually really evident from the drop in that game. Batman is like too powerful. He's gotten really scary because remember the Joker is like in his blood and making him worse. Classic Joker blood problem.

So that whole game you're playing is this like terrifying agent of the police who is like torturing and beating the shit out of people in the street. Batman is like scary from the beginning of that game. And the whole point of that game is at the end he's like, I should no longer be at all. There should be no Batman and he vanishes. And then this game begins and it's like, it's like he came back and they were like, you want to join the Justice League and come to Metropolis. And like, Joker buddy's got brainiac disease and you gotta kill him again. And that's funny if it were kind of a parallel universe, but to actually be like, no, that's the same guy. And he decided to come back and do it again.

It's like, okay, but I mean, I guess whatever. I don't really care. But I can kind of see why people might have a problem with it. They skipped a couple of steps. Well, what's funny, yeah, I mean, if you're like a big DC fan and a big fan of the Arkham games, you're kind of like, this is how they introduce like Superman and like Wonder Woman to this universe. Yeah. everybody.

It also is really weird. Yeah, it is a strange thing to do. Like, this is also, we are living in a world in 2024, our actual world, not an else world, where there's going to be a Wonder Woman video game in theory. We haven't heard about it in a long time. But like to introduce her in a game where the rest of the Justice League is being taken over and turned into evil versions of themselves and stone cold murdered by you, the player, very odd.

very odd choice. Yeah, so I want to make a point that I've made on the show before, that we've talked about on the show before, but it's just as prevalent as ever, which is this is yet another example of a game studio kind of abandoning all of the things that it's really good at in favor of something else entirely. And I guess abandoning might be too harsh a word

because it's really just kind of taking new creative steps. And I think there's a lot of, like, lot of tort. That's worth praising to say, like, hey, this company wanted to get out, out of its rut of what it was used to and like try totally new things. That's totally cool. The problem is that with a lot of these cases, it's way too many variables at once. And the kind of the most infamous example of this is CD Project Rag going from the Witcher 3, a third person action RPG set in fantasy to cyberpunk first person like a sci-fi shooter,

like vertical instead of horizontal, just a totally different set of kind of variables there. And the results were pretty disastrous. And here it seems like the results were, I mean, I don't know, I won't even put an adjective on it because people have different feelings about it. But, but, like, definitely not what a lot of people wanted from rock study. And I think that, like, there are just too many variables here. It's you're going from third person kind of linear levels or levels where you have, like, a big kind of toolbox and you're kind of, you can use your different tools to kind of traverse the environment and knock out enemies with electricity things and all sorts of cool Batman stuff to, like, just kind of. like just kind of a third person shooter where you have to build big arenas where enemies just respond a lot and and multiplayer on top of that when you've been doing all single player and like

shooting instead of fist combat with time dilation and stuff like that. So it's just totally new. And I think that's the main reason it took so long for them to make this game. But I also think it's just kind of it usually just doesn't have great results. And I think in a world where like a company could get away with releasing one game like this as kind of a baseline prototype type thing and then release a second game that like iterates on it and is like knocks it out of the park or revises it the way that uh cd project did with cyberpunk and then phantom liberty that could be fine i guess but we're no longer in that world we're now in a world where like every game um by a triple a big budget video game company is going to cost in the nine figures to develop and needs to

knock it out of the park right away otherwise the developer isn't going to get an chance to like do the sequel that makes things way better. So yeah, we have this problem where it's just like too many variables changing at once. And I wonder if, uh, if there's a world in which a company like this or like biware with Anthem or like, um, arcane with redfall, instead of going so many different ways out of your comfort zone, maybe you change a couple things for your next thing. Maybe you try to stick with some of the things you're good at. I don't know. It's tough. It's not an enviable position. But that seems to me. to be a common factor among a lot of these kind of stories of failure or mediocrity or like subpar

products. That makes me think of Horizon Zero Dawn just because it's the one time, the one exception where you're like, wait a minute, what? They went from Killzone to this? And then it was totally sensational and just made no sense. But it was, I think, the only time I've ever seen that happen, or at least it's the most memorable. Just knocked it out of the park in the first try. I mean, that's kind of the example that Jason was speaking to at the beginning of his little monologue there was like, in theory, if a studio wants to make this pivot and everyone in theory, I don't know how many people, maybe there were naysayers on board for Horizon the first time around being like, it'll never work. But if everyone really wants to make that pivot and it's going to ignite inspiration in everyone, then that's kind of different from just trying to follow the financial direction of a live service game. which it's pretty hard for me to divorce mentally just the fact that these games are a financial plan more so than a creative one.

So basically the way live service works is that you have updates that players need to pay some type of fee to opt into in order to continue to support the ongoing development of the game. So there's some structure that allows the game to pay for itself over time, which is kind of different from the way that like the original Batman Arkham games worked where like you buy a product, you move on with your life. So that is something that just kind of changes the whole development cycle and the way that people think about designing games. So like in the case of this, we've got a team of people who, to say nothing good or bad about it, they just don't have experience with designing a game according to those parameters. Like, they're not used to

designing it according to seasons, like thinking about a narrative structure that unfolds in that type of way and tries to incentivize the player to stay interested across many years or months of content. that's just a different challenge. And I think if you're not really excited to design around that challenge, it's a big pivot in your brain, right? I mean, it's just a totally different way of thinking about a game and the way that it could play out. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, Arkham Knight did have a season pass and there were some interesting, you'd get to play as Batgirl and Nightwing and sort of do these different challenges. And it did sort of hint at this expanded Arkhamverse. It was cool. I don't know how many people like bought that or how successful that was for them. But I'm sure

that they at least went somewhat off of that template for this, but it felt pretty ancillary or sort of inessential to the main Archimed Experience, which was the single-player game. I'm struck by the fact that all of these games keep kind of failing from a sales perspective, these multiplayer superhero games, even though it feels to me like superheroes and the world of comics, it really lends itself to this kind of game,

and it's surprising that this keeps happening over and over again. This happened with the Avengers game where, I mean, that was when we first launched triple-click, right? That had just come out. That's right. And we talked about it. And it was this idea of, oh, this makes sense. So the Avengers are this team. They're all really different.

They can release new heroes, which they did. Remember, they'd be like, oh, Black Panther's coming out. That's going to be really cool. And yet it was just always kind of, it felt a little inert. The game just didn't really grab anyone and no one wanted to keep going. There was just something about maybe it's the PVE nature of the game, just fighting the same sort of weird waves of whatever enemies. So Gotham Knights is a good example because that was another game that just didn't do very well

and no one was very interested in sticking with. A game that I really liked that also tried to do this and also fell short was Marvel's Midnight Suns. Same idea where they had all these amazing heroes that joined that really, really well-made, really fun game. And yet still, that game just didn't really seem to grab them any people. I know it was kind of seen as a sales failure. So it's weird that these superhero games keep falling short. And it also had DLC that was sold separately each time. And in theory, like the Deadpool DLC, the Storm DLC, like those were separate add-ons for Marvel's Midnight Suns.

And I mean, for Axis hasn't said, but they've only said that the game fell short of sales expectations. But it was clearly trying to capitalize on, you like this character, you like that character. And that episodic format of now they are joining the team, now this next person is. Yeah. And I think maybe what all these games have in common is that the core game, like the core thing that you're supposed to be going back to do over and over again, just didn't draw enough people in. I mean, even I didn't go back and play the Midnight Suns TLC, and I loved that game.

I played a ton of it. But once I was done playing it, I was done. I was like, okay, that's enough. If they had maybe done like an excom war of the chosen thing or something where they'd been like, here's a whole new way to play the campaign, and now you can incorporate all these new heroes, I'd go back.

But even then, that'd be a thing that I think a small percentage of hardcore players would do. Where with these other games we're talking about, the Avengers, Gotham Knights, I just think that like the core game didn't really pull people in. And I think it remains to be seen with Suicide Squad, if that's the case. But playing this game feels really similar to me,

where I'm like, a bunch of boring purple enemies in a big arena, just another one of these. I don't have, there's nothing really like pulling me in that much. Yeah, I mean, they all wish they could be destiny, but alas cannot. I mean, I think that's definitely a big factor. I think there are a couple others. I think one is superhero fatigue. That's what I was going to ask next.

Yeah, I think that's a, huge factor. I mean, I think the fact that like, actually a good comparison point is Harry Potter. Last year's Hogwarts Legacy was the biggest game of the year. It sold something like 22 million copies. Like it was number one on the charts. And I think one of the biggest reasons for that is that there wasn't a ton of other Harry Potter content out there. And so people who were like big Potterheads found this thing and hadn't gotten a chance to check out other cool Harry Potter stuff in a while. Whereas if you were in, into the Marvel or the DC, there's just a bazillion new things every single day, and that's a big

part of it. The other thing, and I think this might be the biggest factor of them all, is that every single new service game is just competing with all the old service games in addition to whatever's on the market today. So, I mean, I think at this point, a lot of people already have their entrenched games, and, like, there's been remarkable longevity to games like Fortnite and even Minecraft, and these are games that are, in Minecraft's case, 10 years old, or 15 years old, if you count like that, the real early access stuff, I guess 10 years since Microsoft Bono. But yeah, these are games that just last forever because that's their nature and they have teams dedicated to supporting them forever. And so when a suicide squad comes out, like,

is it really going to grab a ton of players who are looking for a game to just like keep playing persistently? Like how many of them are just like on Diablo 4 or on Destiny 2 or whatever else? which are also fun to play with friends. Like two or three people can jump into Diablo or Destiny, and it's easier to get in. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying I think that a lot of people have their kind of go-to multiplayer service game, and it's very hard to crack that and become someone's new in.

And I think a lot of those people are willing to try new ones and bring their friends in and stuff. But like if you don't have, and that's when the stickiness that you're talking about, crack plays into it. If you don't have that stickiness, everyone's just going to be like, hey, this is boring as hell. Let's go back to Diablo. Let's go back to Destiny.

And I think with Avengers, Avengers was more fun, I thought, than a lot of these other games, but it really suffered from, yes, the repetitive nature of the missions, but also the bugs. Remember the three of us were playing? And like, we all turned into Hulk or something like that. It was really crazy. Speaking of multiversal shenanigans. It was buggy. So that, I think, hurt that game quite a bit, that it felt so half-baked when we were playing.

Yeah. Can we circle back to superhero fatigue for a second? Because my theory is actually that it's. team-based superhero games that do not work. Because people liked Spider-Man too just fine. And so did we. And people sure did buy it. And they sure didn't enjoy swinging around as Spider-Man because it feels really

freaking good. And I was thinking about Spider-Man a lot when I was trying to swing around and failing as Harley Quinn in this game. And I was like, this doesn't feel as good. Now, some of that is because this is a game with four different characters in it. They didn't have as much time to spend on just making Harley Quinn's swinging around feeling really, really good. They also had to try to make Deadshot and King Shark and Captain Boomerang feel good.

And the result is everybody feels kind of mid. And that is a problem. I'll say that Captain Boomerang is kind of cool. He teleports around. And as I was starting to get the hang of it, I was like, I kind of dig this. I mean, I think he's really funny, too. I tend to like him. And I also put him in the, like, special costume where he just looks like a jester.

And I was obsessed with that. There's some things in this game that really endear me to it. And that is part of why I'm kind of sad that it doesn't all hang together into a lovely picture. And instead it's just these disparate pieces. But I think that's partially because since it's not a one character-led game, or at least in Spider-Man 2, even though it kind of has two main characters, they're both Spider-Man. And they both swing around Manhattan. There's a lot of core similarities in terms of the gameplay refining that can happen.

there as compared to all these other games in our comparison list where you have completely different superheroes and they feel totally different and they have to because people know the characters as feeling totally different and those complementary skill sets are what makes a superhero team exciting but also hard to design you know i think that that's something that the guardians of the galaxy game was trying for and doing an okay job at i mean i actually am you know i think that game is is pretty cool in some ways. And that idea where you're playing one hero, but you are part of a team

where you can kind of, you can trigger the abilities from your teammates, that's a cool way to approach a superhero team. So I could see a version of this game where you're just playing as Harley Quinn, because I gotta say, like... She's the most popular one.

Like, let's just admit it. She's not just the most popular one. She's also the one who is like a character, like a real character in the previous games. And she has the best, like character context for all of these different sequences in the story that I've seen so far. She has this

whole ongoing relationship with Batman and it's really fun to see that, them kind of hatching that out. She could be the main character and the other three could be kind of characters that you call in with the D-pad or whatever. That could have been a cool game. Also, that could have then also been a melee game. I don't know. I think if they, it just had

been a very different world where they still wanted to make another Arkham-like game, that would have been a great game. She steals Batman's Batclaw and Boomerang and whatever. Yeah, and then you can still have that, and then you can have the option for her to be a melee character versus other things. Or just she's a melee character. I mean, and you would have these other abilities. But that is just a very different game and clearly not, would not have been the result of the process that was happening. But I think that what Guardians of the Galaxy was

doing to this bigger question of like, how do you make a superhero team game that works? That's a cool idea. I respect that they tried that. And I appreciate what they were going for, even if parts of that game felt a little too busy or like combat didn't quite work as well for me as I wish it had. I mean, it definitely speaks to some of the difficulties of managing so many different kinds of characters. Like a lot of times in battles, I was just visually overstimulated. I was like, there's so many abilities on screen to control here. It's so hard. And that even though you're playing as Peter Quill and you're just commanding the rest of the Guardians of the Galaxy to do each of their special attacks, it kind of felt like, I don't know, doing triage in an emergency room or something.

Like, I'm constantly pointing in different directions. And that's not what's fun about playing a team-based game necessarily. Well, you know, we can, I guess, look at Arkham Knight again, because that game introduced the idea of these tag team sequences, both in stealth and in combat, that were really cool, where you would just be fighting alongside Nightwing. And then occasionally, you'd be able to do these tag team moves where you'd take someone down, but Nightwing mostly took care of himself. There are even some stealth sequences in that game where I'm trying to remember.

Like, you can tell Robin to grab a guy while you're grabbing a guy, and there's some sort of coordinating. There's even that great sequence where one of the Joker's has a bomb and you have to guide Robin behind, or like you're Robin on stage and Batman's behind. I can't remember even what's going on.

Like he's the L.E. Tier Joel and you have to tell him to walk through an elevator shaft or whatever. You're like distracting the bad guy while your partner sneaks around behind him. Like there are cool ways to do that sort of thing within a single-player game, and you don't have to build all combat around the whole team being there all the time, which is what Guardians of the Galaxy did, and one of the reasons it was so busy.

I think, you know, so this very studio, Rocksteady in the past, has experimented with some of these ideas in cool ways that could be elaborated on by whoever in the future. Yeah. I hope that is how it shakes out. I do hope that these really rich executives manage to look at Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad and think to themselves that maybe they made a mistake pushing for live service and possibly giving more money to these mission-based structures because I just, I'm really sad. I'm really sad now that we didn't get a Harley Quinn game.

Well, the flip side of that is that I don't know if we really live in a world anymore where like big companies are going to allow developers to go off for five, six years and spend $100, $200, $300 million, like funding that only to then just have a single, sales period and then they go off to the next like six years or whatever like it just doesn't work as a model unless you're the biggest games or unless you're one of the console makers and you're selling hardware and you're selling games on your own store so you don't have to worry about the 30% cut you're like subsidizing it some yeah i mean i think that like it's just it's a business model that exists because so much of this is just all kind of like uh on very thin ice that is about to crack and just send the

entire big budget video game industry falling into freezing cold water. And yeah, I mean, they're trying to pour water on the ice in the form of these service games, but clearly a lot of it is lukewarm water and it is just not working. Right, because it's melting the ice because the water is too warm. I'm following

your metaphor. It's solid. It's good. Yeah, it's, I mean, but like that's why the stuff exists. It's not necessarily because the executives are like, oh, we can make bazillions of dollars instead of just billions of dollars. That's certainly part of it when it's publicly traded companies.

I mean, it's their job to serve shareholders and have their fiduciary responsibility by making as much as possible and getting that stock up. But a lot of the times, it's just because the current models are just not working as games get more and more expensive every single year to make and just riskier and riskier. It just does not seem like a very good climate right now. And that's why there's so many of these things, because they just seem like if they're ongoing revenue tales. If there's a way to keep making money, you can support your team and pay for the team. And I think that's a big part of it. Do you think that means that we aren't going to see yet

another team-based superhero game in the near future? Are we finally done with these? Or do we think next year yet another one? The Insomniac leak showed that they're working on X-Men. So that's the thing. That's like 10 years from now. So who knows what that's going to look like. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that the superhero thing, that, I think there's clearly diminishing returns on all these superhero properties. Like, who needs them? Then again, I mean, Warner Brothers just came out. They've come out in a couple of interviews. Their CEO, David Zazlov, and a couple of their executives have come out and be like, we want to take all our franchises and make them service games and have them continually releasing stuff and yada, yada, yada. So who knows? You know, it's interesting

because you mentioned Hogwarts Legacy, which is a Warner Brothers published game that did incredibly well and was not a service game. It is very interesting that they're saying that after their most successful game was a single player open world game based on an IP, and now they have this multiplayer game that I don't know how the sales are going to be, but it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't do as well, and I don't know. Maybe it's not too late for them to change that strategy. Although even that game, I mean, I've heard that game had an insane, a truly insane budget attached to it. I don't remember the exact numbers that I heard, but they're they were much more than even your average big budget, like, AAA video games.

So who knows how much of that revenue was actually like profit and how much of it was just like recouping costs. You never know. And it would be more helpful, I think, just as kind of industry pundits and critics and consumers, I think it would be more helpful if a lot of this data was more public the way it is in like Hollywood. But alas, no way to know. love to know, and by that same token, I would love to know more about all of the different drafts of Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League that were in rotation over the years, because playing the final version of the game, even having not beaten it, it just feels like

it was in a lot of drafts. There were a lot of drafts. You know what I mean? And I wish we knew more about all the permutations and rewrites and parts of the game that were taken out and left on the cutting room floor. Maybe someday, maybe in like 20 years, Jason Trier will write a book about it or something and then we'll know more. And by then we'll be playing whatever the new Rocksteady co-founders studio is make, I guess. We can just talk about it then. All right. And with that, let's take a little break and then come back for one more thing. Soundheap with John Luke Roberts is a real podcast made up of fake podcasts. Like if you had a cupboard in your lower back, what would you keep in it?

So I'm going to say mugs. A little yogurt and a spoon. A small handkerchief that was given to me by my grandmother on her deathbed. Maybe some spare honey? I'd keep batteries in it. I'd pretend to be a toy. If I had a cupboard in my lower back, I'd probably fill it with spines. If you had a cupboard in your lower back, what would you keep in it, doesn't exist.

We made it up for Soundheap with John Luke Roberts. An award-winning comedy podcast from Maximum Fun, made up of hundreds of stupid podcasts. Listen and subscribe to Soundheap with John Luke Roberts. Now. Oh, darling, why won't you accept my love? My dear, even though you are a duke, I could never love you. You, you borrowed a book for me and never returned it. Save yourself from this terrible fate by listening to Reading Glasses.

We'll help you get those borrowed books back and solve all your other reader problems. Reading Glasses every Thursday on Maximum Fun. We are back. It's time for one more thing. Kirk, why don't you go first? Sure. I will go first with a buzzy, a fuzzy TV show that I have been watching, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is streaming on Amazon Prime. The whole show, the whole season is out, which I wasn't expecting when I started watching it. And then was a little disappointed by it, because I think if it had come out episodically, people would be buzzing about it even more. It is really great. I think that it's fantastic and wanted to recommend it to any. anybody who was thinking about watching it.

So Mr. and Mrs. Smith is, I mean, I guess it's based on a movie. I know there was also a TV show. There was a guy who wrote a book that was also this premise, who said he was going to see the people who made the movie. It's a kind of well-known idea where there are two spies slash assassins who are married to one another and maybe they know or maybe they don't know in the case of the probably most famous Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is the 2005 Doug Lyman movie starring, of course, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.

They did not know. They didn't know, like, he didn't know that she was an assassin, and she didn't know that he was one. And then they find out, and then it, whatever, they are assigned to kill one another. And I think then they, like, rediscover the spark of their marriage or something. And that movie, it's funny. People have been talking about the movie a lot because of this show

and fondly remembering it. I think that movie is trash. I remember the first time that I saw. It was also panned at the time. People didn't like it at the time. All I know is, it was 2005. I was not. We're mad at Brad Pitt for cheating on Jen.

Oh, well, there was definitely all the tabloid stuff. But I wasn't like watching movies as a critic really at that point. And I remember being like, yeah, I'll see this movie. Great, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, it's going to be fun. And halfway through being like, this sucks. That's my main memory of it. I don't even really remember what happens in it. I just remember I didn't like it.

So anyways, I have no fond memories or attachments to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Fun premise, I guess, but I remember the movie being pretty bad. The show is great. The most well-known thing that happened with this show was. was that the show's lead Donald Glover, who is one of the two co-creators, he co-created with Francesca Sloan, who worked with him on Atlanta and also worked on Fargo. So they're the two showrunners. He was going to star in it alongside Phoebe Wallerbridge, who then left the show over creative differences with him.

Though I gather it was like an amicable thing. They just like had different visions for the show or something. So that was sort of much talked about, I think, at the time, like, oh, she left. The show's in trouble. It's not going to be good. So instead the TV show stars Maya Erskine from Penn 15, who is also the voice of the lead in My Beloved Blue Eyes Samurai and has really been showing her range lately. And she's a much more unusual pick, I think, for a variety of reasons, just because, like, Phoebe Waller Bridge can kind of do vampy, you know, if you think of fleabag or think of things she's been in. She can kind of play that role where Maya Erskine is more awkward and kind of relatable.

That's her vibe on Penn 15. And it really, I would say, changes the energy of the show overall. But it's so good. I think that it's really fantastic. It's really a show about marriage. Every episode is kind of about a different part of a relationship, even though it's put through this kind of high concept lens of them going on spy missions. So the premise here is a little bit different.

They are both hired by this mysterious company to be married to one another and to work together for this company doing, who knows what, they don't even really know. And they get these really weird vague directives basically via text message. that are just like, hi, go to this location, find the package. Okay, don't mess up. Very hotline, Miami. It kind of is, and it's very, like, gig economy. Like, partway into the show, I kind of looked at Emily, and I was like, oh, they're just

gig workers. Like, they're basically just working for Uber. It's like an app that just tells them to do this stuff. So they start out in a very mercenary mode, and then, of course, grow fond of one another and get kind of closer, and it becomes a show that's each episode is kind of about, you know, their second date and the first couple friends that they make. There's one where they're taking care of like an older, like an older target that they have to keep safe. But he's kind of acting like a kid.

So they're kind of acting like parents. It's a really, really funny episode where it's almost like they're having to be parents for the first time. And it's just, it's a great show. I don't know if it's got anything really super deep to say about marriage and love and, you know, being a millennial and what success looks like. I mean, it's all kind of there, like that they have these beautiful house and they're always going to like Italy and, you know, know, it's a really expensive-looking show and very fun just in the outfits that they wear and the places they go. And, like, the only way they can have access to a world like that, and that a lot of

people in our generation can is by becoming contract killers for anonymous, you know, benefactors. Yeah, we are all familiar with this trajectory. Metaphorical contract killers. Well, that's our backup plan if we don't get enough maximum. Right, right. We'll join up with the company and start blowing people up. So it's, I don't know, it's pretty low calorie, but also just,

It's just good. I really like Donald Glover. I haven't seen him in anything in a little while. I really like Maya Erskine. They have this kind of prickly, interesting chemistry together. I just love watching them together, and it's made me and Emily laugh a lot. So it's really great. That's a big recommendation from me for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is on Amazon Prime. Cool. I will add it to my list. I'll go next because I also watched a television show. So Dina and I finished True Detective Season 2, and I felt like I had to follow us. because last week I said I was really enjoying it. And I really did all the way until the finale, which is just absolute dog shit. I don't know why they did that. However, I still think people should watch it. It really doesn't feel like true detective.

And now that we're watching season three, which I think was really a return to form, and which Dina has already repeatedly described as the best so far out of all the seasons we've watched, it's really good, Mahershala Ali. Good actor, turns out. Season two super different. And I think that turned a lot of people off.

It's a kind of bureaucratic mystery. It's kind of like the wire. It's not as smart as the wire, but it's similar in the sense that you really got to keep track of the major players. There's a casino. There's a land deal. There's corruption, not just in the police force, but, you know, bureaucratically in the city, the mayor and his families, a major set of characters in the show.

We really like that kind of mystery. If you don't like bureaucratic corruption as a mystery style, I get why that would turn you off, especially given that that's not really what True Detective Season 1 or 3 are about. They're just like a straight up murder mystery kidnapping kind of deal. But we dug it. So I think if you're like Kirk and you're somebody who just never watched it and you would like a good mystery show, I actually think Vince Vaughn is really good in it.

I guess some people don't like him, but it's a weird role for him. He plays a gangster who's trying to finally go legit. it. And he just has this quiet, weird energy in the way that Vince Vaughn always does. And he's just always quietly seething at people. And I like to watch Vince Fon quietly seethe. And Rachel McAdams wears a lot of flannel shirts. And if you're not attracted to her, you're not part of my marriage, I guess. And so those are big selling points. Finale, I mean, the mystery wraps up fine. That's not my issue. So if that's where you're worried, it's fine. Like the mystery all makes sense. It all lines up it ends. It's just that then they do some things that are completely baffling.

All right. But you can ignore them. Who cares? So yeah, True Detective Season 2. All right, Jason, it's your turn. Lay it on us. I wrote a book. What?

Oh, my goodness. First of the book. Very exciting. I announced my new book, Play Nice, the Rise, Fall and Future of Blizzard Entertainment. Yeah. I'm so excited to read it. comes out on October 8th, Maddie, I'll get you a copy soon.

I can't wait, but Kirk, none for you. Kirk has read an early version. No, Kirk already read one. I read an early version. Although it's still in editing. So, Maddie, you're going to read a better version than Kirk did. Oh, thank God. Yeah, don't stress.

And yeah, it's been quite an interesting project. The book is really just chronicling the entire, like, rise and fall, of Blizzard. I mean, starting in 1991, when like two UCLA students named Mike Morheim and Alan Adham decided they wanted to start a video game company and then going all the way from there from the rise of World of Warcraft and how that truly exploded in a way that nobody saw coming and became like a global phenomenon and transform the company as a result. Up until them, they wind up merging with Activision, which goes pretty well for a few years until Activision and starts saying, hey, we want to get a little more involved in here following the cancellation

of this buzzy project named Titan that was supposed to be the next World of Warcraft. And the book gets into all that. It gets into what Titan was and how it all fell apart. It gets into how Overwatch came from that. It gets into the kind of the modern period of PR snafus and catastrophes that Buzzard went through. It gets into the boardroom battles between Bobby Kodick, the CEO of Activision. Blizzard and Mike Moreheim, the CEO of Blizzard, gets into all sorts of wild stuff. And so if you're interested in Blizzard games, or even if you're not, I think you'll find

this book really fascinating just because it's such a good kind of story about power and money and corporate shenanigans and who gets control of creative and all that good capitalist stuff. And if you ever wondered... If you love capitalism, you'll love this book. It really, it answers a lot of questions that I think people have had about Blizzard over the years. Like, for example, in 2018, Mike Moorheim left the company and he was CEO and co-founder, and everyone was like, why is he leaving the company? But his kind of blog post didn't really explain anything. This book will tell you exactly why he left and why he was felt compelled to leave.

People are wondering about what's the deal with Overwatch 2? What happened with Diablo Immortal? Like, what are all these stories? and the book really kind of gives you answers to a lot of those questions. And then, of course, it gets into the cultural stuff and how the company's culture changed over the years, how it went from like kind of a ton of dudes living in a frat house in the 90s to like becoming a college campus in the 2000s and then touches on the kind of the good and the bad of Blizzard's culture. And it's kind of unique elements and some of the ugliness that came about and was covered in the California lawsuit a few years ago.

when there was a big scandal and then of course gets into the Xbox acquisition and oh so much more. So yeah, if you've ever, if you're curious about Blizzard, this will be an interesting book for you. And yeah, you can pre-order it now. It comes out in October. It's called Play Nice. We'll put a pre-order

link in the show notes. If you think that all sounds interesting, please do go and pre-order it because pre-orders like tell Barnes & Noble and Amazon and whatnot how many copies to get, which makes things easier and makes it sell like, we don't have to scramble at the last minute because there's, like,

a sudden print run or something like that. And pre-orders also count towards, like, bestseller lists and stuff. So they're super helpful as authors. It's a good idea to pre-order a book if you think it sounds interesting and you think that you're going to want to buy it. So yeah, go go check it out. Play nice, the rise, fall, and future of Blizzard Entertainment. Can I just say, because I have read an early version of this book, that it is really, really good. And listeners should be excited. Jason, I think it's the best thing I've ever read by you and I've read a lot of your writing and liked a lot of it. It's a really a hell of a book. Everyone listening, it's really good. Like, I totally co-signed what Jason said about how if you're

into Blizzard you'll like it, but also I think almost anyone would find this book fascinating. It is like, I joke that it could be called Blizzard a capitalism story. It is the story of creativity under capitalism. I think it's so, so interesting. I can't wait until it's out and we can talk about it more on the show because it's really a hell of a book, man. You should be very proud. Thank you, thank you. October. We'll talk about it then. Yep.

Yay. That's very exciting. Very exciting. All right with that, we've done another episode. We sure have. We sure have. I guess we'll see one another next week. See you guys next week.

See you both next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network,

and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Lee. By you.