Author: Game Infliction

Rocksteady has officially delayed Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to February 2, 2024, quite a few months from its previous May 26, 2023 date.

The developer announced the news on Twitter today, writing in a statement, “We have made the tough but necessary decision to take the time needed to work on getting the game to be the best quality experience for players.”

“Thank you to our amazing community for the continued support, patience, and understanding,” the statement goes on. “There is much more to share in the months ahead and we look forward to seeing you in Metropolis next year.”

pic.twitter.com/iycWye9X42

— Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League (@suicidesquadRS) April 13, 2023

It’s only the most recent delay for Kill the Justice League, which was previously set for a 2022 release before being moved to Spring 2023.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that the game would be delayed following backlash after the February 2023 PlayStation State of Play. During that livestream, it was revealed that Kill the Justice League would be a live-service game with a battle pass and require an internet connection even in solo play, garnering controversy.

However, it’s unclear if this delay means Rocksteady be overhauling any of Kill the Justice League’s live-service elements. At the time of the Bloomberg article, reporter Jason Schreier noted that delays like these are usually for “polish” rather than to “overhaul the core gameplay.”

This latest delay means Kill the Justice League will come out nearly nine years after the most recent major Arkhamverse game, Arkham Knight. It will have players choose between one of four supervillains – Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark, and Captain Boomerang – who are tasked with stopping Brainiac’s invasion of Metropolis.

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Joseph Staten just left Microsoft. Technically it didn’t really change anything when talking about the future of Halo compared to when he left Halo developer 343 Industries to return to his previous role at Xbox Publishing back in January. That came amidst the layoff-fueled shakeup at the studio that saw many senior leads leave either at that time or in the past year since Halo Infinite first shipped. And yet somehow, his complete severance from Microsoft feels a bit more somber for this longtime Halo fan, because it means that he’s unlikely to have much, if any, influence on the future of the franchise – which he still could’ve from his Xbox Publishing perch.

And so while it’s fair to wonder where Halo is heading from here – I’ll get to that in a bit – I wanted to take the opportunity to express my gratitude for someone that had a major hand in creating some of my favorite games of all time. Staten was a Bungie “Grizzled Ancient,” the studio’s internal term for someone who’d been at the company for a long, long time. This is the man who wrote the original Halo trilogy. You remember, the near-perfect first game – the one whose memorable campaign and characters single-handedly turned the Xbox into a major player in the console space – the smartly told and shocking sequel that had you playing as The Arbiter for part of the adventure, and the trilogy capper that gave Master Chief and friends closure and meaning while still leaving a glimmer of hope that Spartan-117 might one day return. “Wake me… when you need me.”

But Staten wasn’t done with Halo there. He followed that by directing Halo 3: ODST, the film noir-inspired Halo game that took you out of the MJOLNIR armor and into the boots of a regular-ol’ human. The Covenant bad guys (well, except the Grunts… who, by the way, were voiced by Staten) looked a lot bigger as a regular person than as a seven-foot-tall super soldier. And all of it was set in a pseudo-open hub world where you could go where you wanted to and revisit locations when you wanted or needed to. Everything was watched over by the mysterious Superintendent AI (“Keep it clean!”), which, coincidentally, was also voiced by Staten. And the mood was set by Halo composer Marty O’Donnell’s jazz-inspired, piano-heavy soundtrack that made ODST feel unlike any other Halo game. It is, to this day, still beloved by Halo fans and, for some, remains their favorite Halo game ever.

And then, of course, we get to Halo Infinite. Its six-year development cycle was messy, even just from what we got to see publicly. And after the gameplay debut for the Xbox Series X’s would-be day-one flagship launch title went infamously poorly, Microsoft took the bold and somewhat embarrassing but absolutely necessary step of delaying Infinite out of the Series X’s launch window and bringing Joseph Staten into 343 as the project’s creative director. Though I know there are fans out there who’d hold Joseph accountable for making tough decisions like cutting split-screen co-op and delaying Forge – and as creative director the buck stops with him – in the bigger picture, look at where Halo was at before Staten arrived (i.e. Craig) and look at the campaign we ultimately got in December of 2021. We got an outstanding single-player campaign – one that soft-rebooted Halo while still continuing Chief’s story. And one, I might add, that successfully washed the bad taste of Halo 5’s disastrous campaign out of our mouths. No, Staten didn’t do it alone, but he nevertheless deserves a lot of credit for pulling Halo Infinite together like he did.

And as I mentioned earlier, Halo’s future is nevertheless murky. It seems highly unlikely we’ll get any campaign content whatsoever – be it a side-story DLC with Blue Team (as they are mentioned in an audio log) or a full-blown “Halo 7” – anytime in the next several years or perhaps more. Another big question is, “Who is going to lead Halo into the future?” It won’t be Staten, whom I’d have trusted implicitly. Instead, it might be a younger generation of game development talent at 343 – similar to the young guns at id Software successfully reinventing Doom for the modern era in 2016 – or 343 might look to poach big-name talent from other studios.

But that’s a conversation for another day. For now, I’d like to express my appreciation and gratitude to Joseph Staten for having such a big hand in creating so much of the best Halo there’s ever been: Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo Infinite. That’s a lot for him to be proud of, and I’m so glad I got to play those games as they came out and enjoy the water-cooler conversation that each one generated – and talk to him about his great journey.

Enjoy your next adventure, Joseph, and thanks for all of the great Halo.

Ubisoft’s XDefiant is an upcoming free-to-play first person arena shooter that, if I’m being honest, I didn’t originally feel interested in at all. I had no real connection to any of the factions from different Ubisoft games showcased in XDefiant, and the gameplay didn’t capture my interest. However, I got to play for about an hour in a closed preview event and I was surprised to find that I was wanting to get more playtime in after the servers closed down.

An hour isn’t really a lot of time to give a full preview in any game, so this is just a first impressions piece I wanted to share with you all. I had actually played XDefiant in 2021 with one of Ubisoft’s extremely NDA-ed closed tests, and this was a huge change up from that iteration. It’s a great sign to see that Ubisoft has taken feedback seriously and made some major changes.

In my opinion, XDefiant really didn’t have a sense of identity when the first closed test opened. I couldn’t figure out what the game was trying to do or how the game was supposed to feel. There was no real guidance on how to play the game or who the characters were. But loading into XDefiant now, there’s more structure to it.

Factions

Let’s start with Factions. There’s no story or narrative on why these agents from each Faction are in XDefiant. In speaking with Safy Saada, Creative Director, I was told that there’s no underlying story or reasoning for these characters being in XDefiant. They were merely inspirations.

Each Faction is really just like selecting a class with different Abilities and Ultras (ultimates). There were five Factions available in this closed beta and I detailed their abilities and class-specific traits below:

• Cleaners: Origin – Tom Clancy’s The Division.
  • Passive:
    • Incendiary Rounds: Weapons inflict extra burn damage over time but decreases the weapon range
  • Abilities:
    • Incinerator Drone: Napalm-Delivering drone burns everything in its flightpath
    • Firebomb: Throw a Molotov cocktail causing explosive damage and lighting the area with fire
  • Ultra
    • Bring out a flamethrower that incinerates enemies
• Dedsec: Origin – Watchdogs 2
  • Passive:
    • Fabricator: After a device is deployed, your Fabricator prints a new one
  • Abilities:
    • Hijack: Hack enemy-deployed abilities and make them yours
    • Spiderbot: Deploy a Spiderbot that will target and stun the nearest enemy
  • Ultra:
    • Lockout: Deploy an EMP that prevents enemies from using their Abilities and Ultras in the radius of the Lockout
• Echelon: Origin – Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
  • Passive:
    • Low Profile: Your character does not appear on the enemy’s minimap
  • Abilities:
    • Digital Ghillie Suit: Turn invisible when not shooting your weapon
    • Intel Suit: Periodic sonar waves reveal where enemies are around you
  • Ultra:
    • Sonar Goggles: Activates your sonar goggles to see through walls and allows you to deploy Sam Fischer’s 5.7 pistol to eliminate enemies
• Libertad: Origin – Far Cry 6
  • Passive:
    • Espiritu de Libertad: You slowly heal over time and heal nearby enemies over time as well
  • Abilities:
    • BioVida Boost: You regen health and boost the total amount of health for you and nearby enemies in a specific radius
    • El Remedio: Throw a gas canister that heals friendlies until it’s destroyed or out of fuel
  • Ultra:
    • Medico Supremo: Your Medico backpack provides a large health and healing boost for a limited time
• Phantoms: Origin – Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Phantoms
  • Passive
    • Hardened: Health increased
  • Abilities
    • Mag Barrier: Deploy an electromagnetic barrier that blocks incoming enemy fire and grenades while letting you shoot through it
    • Blitz Shield: Equip a tactical shield that lets you shield bash with melee
  • Ultra
    • Aegis: Deploy a spherical plasma shield that moves with you and equips you with an electro shotgun

Each Faction has their own traits and abilities to make them stand out and be more viable in a team composition. There are six people on each team and there’s no limit on how many people can be from one Faction. I honestly found myself playing predominantly as The Division’s Cleaners or Splinter Cell’s Echelon.

The flamethrower Ultra that Cleaners have was incredibly strong, and by that I mean you barely had to touch an enemy’s hitbox to insta-kill them. Also, the flamethrower’s time to use let you get in quite a few kills before the Ultra was used up. Additionally, the incendiary rounds passive Cleaners have were equally as oppressive and overpowered. If you had an SMG you could basically run half your mag into an enemy and let the fire damage over time do its thing and watch your enemies desperately try to run away only to die around the corner due to the damage over time effect.

Echelon made it so my hitbox was incredibly small and I could run around in my invisible suit and pop in and out to kill enemies by surprise. I mostly bounced between these two Factions since they felt the most overpowered, but each Faction really had its own balance issues. The Libertad’s healing abilities nearly instantly healed me and my teammates and it was impossible to try and kill anyone standing in the area of effect healing because of how effective the rate of healing was.

There’s definitely a need for some heavy tuning and balance adjustments with the Factions and their abilities. Yes, XDefiant felt fun in that hour of playtime I got, but I could easily see how frustrating things could get if one team just absolutely rolled the other from being made up of all Cleaners. I think maybe limiting how many Factions are allowed to be in a team (like one Libertad and up to two of the other Factions) would be helpful, especially since each Faction seems to serve a specific team role.

Weapons

But I liked that none of the Factions were limited to a specific weapon loadout. You can make loadouts that can then be selected by any Faction when you enter a match. The time to kill (TTK) was extremely fast and reminded me of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The SMG and Shotguns were incredibly overpowered, not even with the Cleaners’ additional passive abilities. Thus, any faster rate of fire weapons and immediate burst weapons were the best to use in matches.

The shotgun, meanwhile, was basically a one-hit kill and SMGS barely needed to run through a full mag before shredding an opponent. Again, some aggressive balancing here will help the future of XDefiant, but I will say the gunplay and movement felt so much better in this game than Hyper Scape, which was Ubisoft’s other recent attempt at a free-to-play multiplayer shooter.

XDefiant unsurprisingly has game modes similar to Overwatch and Call of Duty, but the mix kept matches from feeling stagnant. The game modes included in the beta included Domination, Occupy, Escort, and Zone Control. I kept getting Domination and Zone Control so I can’t speak on the other game modes, but those two felt incredibly fast paced and fun. Even when I was getting killed repeatedly and trying to run back to defend a point, I found myself giggling every time I would sneak up on an enemy to take them by surprise before taking out their other teammates and securing a point for my team.

Live Service

But it’s not enough for a multiplayer game to be fun these days. There are only so many hours in the day, so not every game can survive and thrive. So when I asked how this game would be supported as a live-service game, since I experienced a hefty laundry list of weapons, abilities, and mechanics that needed to be rebalanced, Saada explained that they built XDefiant to have a flexible code which would make future changes and updates easier to implement.

This was pretty huge for me since one of my main games is Apex Legends and one of the consistent issues throughout the seasons there have been audio bugs. Oftentimes there are no audio cues on abilities, weapons, or footsteps and that has been a huge problem with Apex. Respawn has stated that they’re not able to just fix things immediately because the code would break from the two years they’ve spent updating the game so it’s more complicated than pushing a simple fix.

So hearing Ubisoft specify that they are building XDefiant to be flexible with updates and changes is incredibly relieving, especially since I wasn’t a huge fan of how they handled Hyper Scape, a game I reviewed and specified had a huge potential but wasn’t updated fast enough to actually survive past a month of its release. I feel very hopeful for XDefiant as it shows a lot of signs that Ubisoft has learned from its past mistakes of launching an FPS game that just did not resonate with the current standard for FPS games.

Again, it’s not perfect and definitely requires a lot of major and fine tuning. But the core gameplay is there and it’s fun. There’s another Closed Beta happening on the 13th and I’ll be playing more then to see if changes have been made and how updates feel, but I’m genuinely feeling optimistic about the trajectory of XDefiant.