EDGE

MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS

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Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release March 2022

I understand why players would treat XCOM like a puzzle. I think I backed myself into those interpreta­tions. You get this confidence as a player that all the informatio­n’s out there, but it’s not all of it. The aliens are operating under AI that you don’t understand. There really are some [losses] where you didn’t do anything wrong, and actually you had a tough spot with some systemic elements.

Midnight Suns is another step in the direction of telling the player as much as we can. Our enemies have a symbol on

their flag that says, ‘I am going to attack this hero next turn’. And your abilities say exactly what they’re gonna do. We have one percentage [probabilit­y] element in the game, which is when you knock somebody into a hole or off a building, and that’s fun because it’s the only percentage in the game. Everything else in Midnight Suns is very explicit. You can plan out actions in advance. Whether it’s better or whether it’s worse, I don’t know. But it’s been fun to work in that space as a designer.

Is it less terrifying to go through a tough prototypin­g period now? Yes. I didn’t know what this game was when I started. I’ve worked with most of my team for a very long time. They’re all open to the idea of a lot of rapid change. Everybody, from design to art, they’re used to this period of spinning things up. There’s a lot of creative freedom with my publisher, 2K, and ultimately Take-Two.

When you’re in a place as a designer of ‘this isn’t working’, every show you watch, every game you play, you’ll take any lifeline. I watched the Wonder Woman movie, and there’s a scene where she jumps up into a sniper tower, kicking stuff and taking out four or five guys. And I was thinking, ‘Man, that’s what I would love for the game to look like. We need to get that feeling’. And I was playing Slay The Spire and thinking, ‘Could I turn abilities into that?’ It evolved from pulling everything in.

This wasn’t conscious, but Midnight Suns is basically the opposite of XCOM. You’re not stuck on this map with terrifying aliens – the bad guys are terrified of you. Mechanical­ly, thematical­ly, it’s just XCOM completely reversed.

Both XCOM and XCOM 2 were very fraught games as we were developing them. I wasn’t confident in them. But with Midnight Suns, from our very first playable milestone years ago, we were like, “There’s something pretty cool here”. There were so many things wrong, but even from the beginning this game has felt different in the sense that it was fun pretty early. That’s always a good feeling.

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 ?? ?? This far into Marvel’s pop cultural takeover, the public has proven itself ready for a deep cut. Rise Of The Midnight Sons is a favourite comic of Solomon’s, and an excuse to team up Wolverine, Iron Man and Ghost Rider
This far into Marvel’s pop cultural takeover, the public has proven itself ready for a deep cut. Rise Of The Midnight Sons is a favourite comic of Solomon’s, and an excuse to team up Wolverine, Iron Man and Ghost Rider

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