Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ developers want you to break it | Digital Trends

It became clear during my chat with the designers that the Marvel universe was in caring hands. When Weinhoffer told me that he made sure there was a swimming pool to chat with the heroes at just because it was such a staple to old X-Men comics, I knew the game was being handled by true fans.

Going back to the beginning, Midnight Suns originally played a lot closer to XCOM — that was until the team realized the mold didn’t fit thematically for larger-than-life heroes. Solomon, Weinhoffer, and the rest of the team ditched that version and did a physical tabletop version of the game using Heroclix, an old board game that starred miniatures of Marvel heroes. It’s a reference that sent me back to my childhood, where I’d always see those little figures in my local comic shop.

“We had some of the environment objects in there where that’s where it’s like the car in the middle.” Soloman says. “Heroes could use an ability to jump off of the car or pick it up, etc. So a lot of the interactive environment stuff was in since that initial version.”

Of course, you can’t just copy this, add it to an XCOM clone, and call it a day. The duo discussed this old version, which featured the classic strategy game mechanic, hit chance. That entails having a specific percentage chance of hitting an enemy. Solomon stated that this didn’t fit thematically, bringing up how goofy it is for Captain America or Iron Man to miss a hit on a foe.

“These are people with superpowers. They don’t need to worry about hiding and sneaking around and having more of that underdog approach,” Solomon says.

As the team pulled away from the XCOM formula, it chased a new design philosophy that would pit heroes against armies of enemies. To balance for the fact that heroes would now hit 100% of the time, the card system was born.

This led us to the core philosophy of Midnight Suns‘ battle system: Solomon and Weinhoffer describe missions as puzzles. You’re thrown into a random location with the team of your choice, pitted against random foes that might even feature a big-time comic enemy, and are dealt your selected cards at random. It’s a never-ending puzzle in the form of a strategy game and it actually is one of both designers’ most anticipated pieces to get into players’ hands. Why? Because they can’t wait to see what kind of broken hero and card combinations players create to solve these puzzles.

“You can use your individual hero decks and ability loadouts to really synergize with one another,” Solomon says. “Like bringing Doctor Strange because he’s going to generate a ton while Ghost Rider spends it all for big splashy high damage attacks.”

“Yeah, people are going to find some broken shit where we’re just like ‘Oh my God,’ but that’s kind of the fun,” Weinhoffer continued. “That’s the joy of games like this. And it’s also made even better by the fact that at every turn you can’t exactly predict what abilities are there thanks to the card system. So it’s cool to break the game every once in a while to where it’s like when everything lines up just right.”

Based on what I’ve seen and heard, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is lining up to be one of the biggest surprises of the year. The fact that I get to talk with Venom and Magik like I’m playing Persona, control them in XCOM-like battles, and potentially come up with Exodia card combos like I’m playing Yu-Gi-Oh? I’m sold.