Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League taken offline for the second time, eating through players' early access playtime

Suicide Squad: Kill the justice League has been taken offline for indefinite maintenance for the second time since its early access window began yesterday.

Less than an hour after the game's early access period (only available to players who had purchased its deluxe edition) began for players in the New Zealand time zone, the game was pulled offline. According to developer Rocksteady, that maintenance was due to a bug that could mark players' story completion to 100% as soon as they logged into the game, locking them out of any main missions.

This morning, the game's Twitter account again announced "scheduled maintenance" starting at 03:30 PT (06:30 ET/11:30 GMT). Any players online at that time were logged out of the game, which would remain unavailable "until maintenance has been completed." That maintenance was completed just under 90 minutes later, but there's no word on what it aimed to achieve.

It's an increasingly bad look for a game that charged players an additional $30 for early access. The deluxe edition also offered battle pass tokens and cosmetics, but the ability to play the game 72 hours early was definitely the headline feature. Yesterday's maintenance, however, immediately whittled that figure down to 63 hours, after a fix finally rolled out more than nine hours after the initial maintenance began. Some players are suggesting that they've only been able to spend an hour or less with the game so far. Developer Rocksteady is clearly hoping to impact as few players as possible with an early morning maintenance schedule in the US, but the fact remains that there will be users in other parts of the world who have been kicked from the game for a second time in two days.

Where players have been able to explore Metropolis, they've been poking into the city's secrets. Those include a tribute to late Batman and Harley Quinn voice actors Kevin Conroy and Arleen Sorkin, as well as evidence of some of the other characters coming up in the game's post-launch seasons. There'll be a bigger influx of players later this week when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League gets its full release on February 2.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League's Warner Bros bosses want a closer relationship between DC's movies and games.