Warner Bros says Wonder Woman won't be a live-service game

Last week, a job listing for a lead software engineer on Monolith's Wonder Woman game popped up, with requirements like "Knowledge of 3D math commonly used in game development" and "Prior experience working in a 3D game engine (Unreal, Unity, etc.)" Among the non-essential "Nice to Haves" was "Experience helping maintain a live software product or game".

This was interpreted by Wccftech as confirmation that Wonder Woman would be a live-service game, complete with battle pass, seasonal updates, and all the other hallmarks of the genre. There's a certain amount of precedent in the market after all, and CEO of Warner Bros David Zaslav has said that the company wants to transform franchises like Superman into live-service games.

As depressing visions of daily missions to level-up an invisible jet and unlockable cosmetic tiaras danced in our heads, Warner Bros responded with a statement to IGN denying it was making Wonder Woman a live-service game. "Wonder Woman is a single-player action-adventure game set in a dynamic open-world. This third person experience will allow players to become Diana of Themyscira and introduce an original story set in the DC Universe, while also featuring the Nemesis System. Wonder Woman is not being designed as a live service," the statement said.

It's interesting that publishers, or at least their PR departments, are starting to become aware of how disliked the live-service trend is. Diablo 4 suffered a substantial backlash from players who had been positive about it at launch then frustrated by its first season, and early interest in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been almost drowned out by skepticism over its live-service elements. EA was ahead of the curve, committing to service games in 2019 then walking that back with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. Casey Hudson, who was general manager of BioWare at the time, said that "when we talk about 'live' it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story." Perhaps the same is true of Wonder Woman's job listing.

The most promising thing we've heard about Monolith's Wonder Woman is that it'll be bringing back the Nemesis system the studio designed for its Middle-earth games, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. Actually, that's one of the only things we've heard about it, apart from the fact it'll be a "singleplayer open world action game."

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.