Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's developers are leaning into build-crafting and Diablo-style tweaks after launch.
Game director Axel Rydby recently answered a fan question about "build possibilities" in Suicide Squad. "We really want you to feel like you can make each character your own, and built it to suit your playstyle," Rydby writes in the first screenshot below.
Suicide Squad devs emphasize loot RPG build-crafting and tease Diablo-style post-launch tweaks pic.twitter.com/3PPTz4kPeuJanuary 12, 2024
The game director writes that there's "hundreds of possible combinations and permutations for builds" across the four Suicide Squad characters. It sounds like there'll be a lot of gear for Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, and King Shark to play around with, and Rydby adds that there'll be "a lot" of additions to Suicide Squad after launch.
Rydby then delves into each character's Afflictions, which come from Poison Ivy, and can be applied to melee weapons and grenades. This further differentiates each character, and each of the four antiheroes has a Talent Tree, where the player can manually unlock abilities which cater to specific play styles. Harley has more acrobatic abilities, for example, whereas King Shark is a bullet sponge.
That's all before we get to the weapons: there are six weapon types in Suicide Squad, and each character is proficient with a different combination of three weapons. There's assault rifles, pistols, sniper rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and heavy weapons, which includes both miniguns and light machine guns. Rydby writes that the Afflictions, Talent Trees, and weapons combine to create "a lot of depth."
Obviously there are a lot of different elements at play here, and it sounds like Suicide Squad is only going to get bigger after launch with more gear and items to play around with. This isn't to say that Rocksteady's new game is live service though, as one Suicide Squad dev recently pushed back against live service labels, saying there's more to the new game than a simple genre descriptor.
Elsewhere recently, Rocksteady said that Suicide Squad is its biggest-ever game "story wise," so we can expect it to be comfortably bigger than all the Batman: Arkham games. You can read up on our extensive Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League preview for a full look at how the game plays, and how it's shaping up ahead of launch.
You can also check out our new games 2024 guide for a look ahead at all the other big releases set to debut over the rest of the year.
