Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is experiencing a rocky start to its early access period on January 29. Just one hour after launch in New Zealand, the game’s servers were taken offline due to a critical bug encountered by some players.
The issue caused affected players’ campaigns to be automatically marked as completed upon first login, essentially skipping the entire story. Rocksteady promptly acknowledged the problem via the game’s official Twitter account. They said they’re aware of the bug and are taking the game servers offline to fix it. It will last several hours, which means early access isn’t that early.
The server downtime impacted early access players who purchased the Deluxe Edition, granting them 72 hours of early playtime ahead of the official February 2 launch. That promise of buying the game early has been broken, but hopefully, it won’t last for long. Rocksteady has not yet provided an update on the estimated duration of the maintenance or the status of affected players’ progress.
The game was already looked down on because of all the downsides of live-service. Now, it’s taken down due to an issue that only came with live-service features. The server shutdown adds another layer of complexity to the pre-launch discussion surrounding Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The game’s mandatory online requirement and integration of Denuvo DRM have already drawn criticism from some players, and this early access hiccup is likely to fuel those concerns further.
How Rocksteady will handle the situation moving forward remains to be seen. Even if they resolve the issue and put the service back online, this is a huge hit to the game. They are already starting on a bad foot by having issues related to online connectivity. We’re hoping things go well because Rocksteady is a great studio, but we can’t help but think they’ve put themselves in a bad position with this live-service stuff.
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