With Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League effectively dead and buried, Rocksteady Studios seems to be returning to the beloved Batman: Arkham series for a new game.
Failed live-service games have been one of the biggest stories in the video game industry in recent years. While games like Anthem should have been a cautionary tale, major video game publishers didn’t take heed. The result has been Foamstars, Concord, XDefiant, The Last of Us Online, and many others crashing and burning upon release.
Few games have been as obviously doomed as Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The fan response to the initial reveal, the gameplay trailers, the story, release, monetization model, and everything else was loudly negative at every step. This wasn’t just standard social media harrumphing either, as the game itself failed to pass the “eyeball check” with critics or skeptics. This didn’t get corrected after release, with middling reviews being followed by backlash to the DLC
While the game itself was a major issue, one of the biggest gripes regarding Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was that Rocksteady Studios was working on a doomed live-service shooter instead of making a new Batman: Arkham game. While it took some time, and hundreds of layoffs, this injustice might be corrected.
Job listing hints that Rocksteady may be making new Batman: Arkham game
Job listings for Rocksteady Studio hint at the studio working on a game that may be a new entry in the Batman: Arkham series.
The job listing on the Warner Bros website calls for candidates with “strong design leadership and experience across multiple genres, particularly Third-Person Action, Melee Brawlers, and Open World Traversal games.” A third-person action game with open-world traversal and melee brawling certainly sounds like the Arkham series.
This job listing isn’t the only major hint regarding a return for the Arkham series.
In 2024, Warner Bros Discovery executive David Zaslav stated that WB Games would realign to focus on four franchises; Mortal Kombat, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and DC Comics. It was also explicitly noted that Batman would be central to those DC Comics efforts.
Lore changes to Arkhamverse were undone in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
While the Batman seen in the Arkham series of games was seemingly killed in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, that wasn’t the case.
Fans of the series, and haters of Suicide Squad, raged over a scene in the game where Batman was seemingly shot to death by Harley Quinn. Given how Rocksteady was insistent that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and the Arkham line of games were in a shared universe, this meant the beloved character had been unceremoniously killed.
That was undone in the final update to Suicide Squad. The story was tweaked to remove any long-term lore implications to the game through alternate reality shenanigans.
This would allow Rocksteady to potentially return to the Batman: Arkham games where they left off. The last proper console release in the series was 2016’s Arkham Knight, but Rocksteady also developed Batman: Arkham VR for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The last Arkham game was another VR game, Camouflaj’s Batman: Arkham Shadow for the Meta Quest, but this was not developed by Rocksteady.
Arkham Knight ended with Batman faking his own death and Bruce Wayne leaving Gotham behind. A new Batman: Arkham game from Rocksteady would need to address that, but fans have renewed hope of a return.
