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Marvel's Midnight Suns (aka What If Firaxis Made a Superhero Tactical RPG)

Vinegrape said:
I like Magik as the team skyranger taxi.

I hate how they keep stressing how there's no "gameplay-related microtransactions"...which means there are other microtransactions.



The stuff where you just hang out at the Abbey is basically the premise of every Avengers fanfic from the past decade.

And they made it as unsexy as possible.

God, that's mean.
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I bet you it's all Disney trying to control the brand. 😔

The House of Mouse can't allow anyone to raw dog Ghost Rider, it would open the floodgates. People would be coming to them with Marvel dating sims and the like.
 
Yeah there's basically a whole bunch of previews out there now, both professional and various youtubers and what not who got to play the hands on:
Marvel's Midnight Suns: 7 Hands-On Takeaways
As a fan of trading card games, I enjoyed strategizing the best moves a hand offers, and thanks to the way decks are structured, I always had an option. Individual hero decks sport eight cards and must contain a certain number of each card type and up to two copies of the same card, ensuring players have a balanced mix of options. It also helps that you can redraw a card twice per turn, letting you ditch abilities you may be unable to use at the moment.

[...]

The Abbey's most substantial activities involve socializing with allies in what Firaxis dubs the "Friendship System." Similar to games like Mass Effect or Fire Emblem, the more you ingratiate yourself with a character, the closer you'll become. The simplest way to build favor is through dialogue. Choosing a response that resonates positively with someone nets you a point in their favor. Saying something wrong has the opposite effect, and knowing your audience is critical. Tony Stark may appreciate a snarky comment, but the more hard-nosed Blade might take offense. Positive or negative responses earn points towards the Hunter's respective light and darkness skill trees, so there's some incentive to being a jerk if you want to obtain darker skills. Still, I had trouble wanting to be anything but an angel since it feels like there are more benefits to having everyone like me, but I'd have to go all-in on being a nuisance to know for sure.
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View: https://youtu.be/0UGXIRcliOM
Like the big thing I've noticed is that how it seems like everybody who played did grok the gameplay pretty easily and got into it even if it sounds a bit weird at first since yeah it is a shared hand between all heroes when you're playing in missions...but as that GI quote mentions, they've added rules for how you can build a hero's deck so it's harder to build yourself a deck that feels unusable (which is like the #1 concern I keep seeing mentioned about this game's previews elsewhere) along with being way more generous on giving you mulligans for the poor hands you can still get, since it's just straight up you can redraw twice per turn, no limitations as far as I've see.

I mean I can definitely see the power curve eventually turning into being extremely player sided where the enemy can only mildly impede you by the endgame with all that, but it's not like that's going be new for a Firaxis game led by Jake Solomon. :V

EDIT: oh yeah also for those wondering, the Hunter's only required on what the game calls major missions. Side missions are led by one of the twelve heroes and can generally take whoever (I assume exceptions would exist if these include the missions you can get from building up friendship with the characters, though those are probably major missions)
 
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So bumping this again since recently they've been doing gameplay showcases with ChristopherOdd, focusing on a couple heroes every couple of weeks or so:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpBL5LD181s

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryPiuPeOTuA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrKZInJ9nk

Also there was an interview I had missed prior, where Jake had some interesting answers about a couple aspects of the game:
Article:
Q: At what point, crudely, would players have unlocked all the characters?

A: For all the characters, you have to beat the game. You have to beat the game to get the last one, yeah.

Q: I assume that's the super-secret last one?

A: That's one we have not announced yet. To unlock all the characters, you have to beat the game, and then we have a new game plus mode, so you will be able to use that. Yeah, we kind of meter out our heroes over the backend. We turn on new gameplay systems over the back half of the game, so the players are always like doing new stuff.
 
Is there gonna be an option to disable the card system and play with a standard turn-based attack system?
 
Honestly, if there's one thing I'm worried about, it's that this game will just that little bit too random to really have the feeling I get in X-Com 2.

In X-Com 2, a large part of the appeal for me is that when things go wrong I can look at what happened and say "I probably should have done this other thing differently", with the singular exception of doing "protect the device" and every enemy pod on the map congregating too closely to proc them one at a time, fail states occur quickly and obviously, and learning is pretty easy. In this one I'm a bit worried that it's going to wind up with the usual card game problem where, I have answers in my deck, I just didn't draw any, therefore I lost. And sure, X-Com 2 occasionally has those "that was a 96% shot and it missed and now everything's harder" but usually if missing that one shot actually kills me I was already losing to other mistakes.

That said, my other experience with deck building turn based tactics is Pirate101 and that worked reasonably well IME. But, the Iron Man vid suggests to me that one of the things that MADE it work well won't be the case here, what made that work for me was that the decks were per character, so you could reliably have a character that had important answers always available.
 
Ehorin said:
In X-Com 2, a large part of the appeal for me is that when things go wrong I can look at what happened and say "I probably should have done this other thing differently", with the singular exception of doing "protect the device" and every enemy pod on the map congregating too closely to proc them one at a time, fail states occur quickly and obviously, and learning is pretty easy. In this one I'm a bit worried that it's going to wind up with the usual card game problem where, I have answers in my deck, I just didn't draw any, therefore I lost. And sure, X-Com 2 occasionally has those "that was a 96% shot and it missed and now everything's harder" but usually if missing that one shot actually kills me I was already losing to other mistakes.
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I don't really see a tangible difference between "there is a 96% chance you make the shot but you miss" and "there is a 96% chance you draw the card you need but you don't" besides the latter giving you the option to choose a different less optimal action rather than commit to the futile one. Assuming its an exact copy of Gilgamech (3 heroes, 8 cards per hero in the deck, 6 card hand, redraw up to 2 cards per turn, play up to 3 cards a turn than draw replacements) you should be cycling through between a 1/3rd and a 1/2th of your deck each turn.
 
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firefossil said:
I don't really see a tangible difference between "there is a 96% chance you make the shot but you miss" and "there is a 96% chance you draw the card you need but you don't" besides the latter giving you the option to choose a different less optimal action rather than commit to the futile one. Assuming its an exact copy of Gilgamech (3 heroes, 8 cards per hero in the deck, 6 card hand, redraw up to 2 cards per turn, play up to 3 cards a turn than draw replacements) you should be cycling through between a 1/3rd and a 1/2th of your deck each turn.
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Ok, like, I haven't actually seen any of this so far in what we've seen, but, like, in other card games, there'll often be things where you run one or two of them because they are absolutely essential to have available SOMETIMES but other times will just sit in your hand and do fuck all. And sometimes, you know, you have a third of your deck that stops it, and you just don't see those cards anyway, even if you are seeing 1/3rd to 1/2 your deck each turn.

Like, so far, we've seen basically nothing that isn't some flavor of "does damage" or "absorbs damage" with all of ONE exception, Strange's stealth heroic. And so, I find myself wondering, what happens if there's some fight where that stealth heroic type mechanic is critical to winning, and then you just don't draw your stealth cards in time. And if that sort of thing never happens, if every fight can be won with damage and block and regen and just "numbers go up and down", well... then there's interesting questions about just how replayable this thing will actually be? For that matter, then there's questions about how interesting the combat will be at all. Basically, it seems to me that this one is doomed for me, to either be basically a spectacle fighter without the button pressing, or an incredibly frustrating roulette of "did I draw what I need this turn?"

It's worth noting, this exact thing is why so many Slay the Spire style games boil down to the best strat being "your deck is exactly as large as the number of cards you can get through in a turn", because that way you always have ENOUGH numbers going up and down.

And the tangible difference is that in X-Com I can look back and say "I wouldn't be in this sort of spot if I'd done X differently earlier", in a card game the reasons I deck built and had that 96% chance are probably exactly correct ANYWAY, it's pure RNG that I didn't draw it this one time.
 
My big worry is that the game becomes largely solved pretty fast, as even the positioning looks weak so it's mainly just playing cards; you lack the roguelike deck building so unless enemies have wildly different abilities necessitating different solutions depending on how they're combined it's going to get bland.
 
Mutton said:
My big worry is that the game becomes largely solved pretty fast, as even the positioning looks weak so it's mainly just playing cards; you lack the roguelike deck building so unless enemies have wildly different abilities necessitating different solutions depending on how they're combined it's going to get bland.
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The spiderman video mentioned something about replacing cards (specifically how you probably wouldn't want to replace his opportunist card), so there may be some form of deck building?
 
Cosar said:
The spiderman video mentioned something about replacing cards (specifically how you probably wouldn't want to replace his opportunist card), so there may be some form of deck building?
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There looks to be deckbuilding in the same way you'd have equipment for XCOM, not deckbuilding as you'd have in a roguelite
 
Ehorin said:
It's worth noting, this exact thing is why so many Slay the Spire style games boil down to the best strat being "your deck is exactly as large as the number of cards you can get through in a turn", because that way you always have ENOUGH numbers going up and down.

And the tangible difference is that in X-Com I can look back and say "I wouldn't be in this sort of spot if I'd done X differently earlier", in a card game the reasons I deck built and had that 96% chance are probably exactly correct ANYWAY, it's pure RNG that I didn't draw it this one time.
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StS actually favors large decks, not that's relevant as I assume Midnight Suns has a fixed deck size like its inspiration.

Ehorin said:
Ok, like, I haven't actually seen any of this so far in what we've seen, but, like, in other card games, there'll often be things where you run one or two of them because they are absolutely essential to have available SOMETIMES but other times will just sit in your hand and do fuck all. And sometimes, you know, you have a third of your deck that stops it, and you just don't see those cards anyway, even if you are seeing 1/3rd to 1/2 your deck each turn.
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Gilgamech and presumably Midnight Suns is unlike most deckbuilders in that you do not discard cards at end of turn. Which means you might play 3 cards, sit on 2 more, and use redraw twice on the last least useful card to fish for some option you need. It also looks like in Midnight Suns that the party gets 1 move and 2 item uses, has ways of adding more moves to the common pool, some attacks move characters in the process of landing them, some cards are free to play (allowing you to cycle more too) and Heroism can be used to interact with the environment in addition to spending on high power cards, so seems like a lot of flexibility.

Ehorin said:
Like, so far, we've seen basically nothing that isn't some flavor of "does damage" or "absorbs damage" with all of ONE exception, Strange's stealth heroic. And so, I find myself wondering, what happens if there's some fight where that stealth heroic type mechanic is critical to winning, and then you just don't draw your stealth cards in time. And if that sort of thing never happens, if every fight can be won with damage and block and regen and just "numbers go up and down", well... then there's interesting questions about just how replayable this thing will actually be? For that matter, then there's questions about how interesting the combat will be at all. Basically, it seems to me that this one is doomed for me, to either be basically a spectacle fighter without the button pressing, or an incredibly frustrating roulette of "did I draw what I need this turn?"
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Mutton said:
My big worry is that the game becomes largely solved pretty fast, as even the positioning looks weak so it's mainly just playing cards; you lack the roguelike deck building so unless enemies have wildly different abilities necessitating different solutions depending on how they're combined it's going to get bland.
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I'm not sure what your basis is for that. Just watching the Spiderman video, I see the following:
Chain Strike: Quick (doesn't use a card play), moves him when he attacks, and can be repeated on KOs.
Web Throw: Knockback, notes knockback into things damages. Can damage other enemies too with pseudo-AoE and apply some kind of Marked effect.
Winds of Watoom: Quick, Knockback, and has having a certain level of Heroism boost it, without consuming it.
Opportunist: Gives more Heroism, gives additional Moves (to the common pool? unclear?) and lets you do more environmental attacks.
Thwip: Stuns an enemy while making environment attacks deal more damage.
Strengthened: Boosts overall attack strength for a turn, normally exhausts, but can be upgraded to not (for better or worse) and to draw the last attack card play (definitely better)
Infernal Spider: Draws a Spiderman card, makes next 3 Spiderman cards not count against plays, can benefit from being drawn by a redraw.
Continuing to watch the other videos, I'm seeing a lot of resources in play. In terms of action resources, there are card plays, Heroism, moves, draws, redraws, items, interactive environmental objects. Even ignoring broader strategy, that means on a turn to turn basis means you are juggling a lot of resources in the optimization game for squeezing the most each round. Then you have the status effects and modifiers like block, resist, lifesteal, stealth, taunts and counters, chain and full combo, stunned or marked or weakened enemies, etc etc.

I mean I'm not sure what people are looking for here. X-Com is when you break it down just "move from cover to cover while shooting the aliens", but there is obviously a degree of option variance in moves, shoots, and aliens. The character videos don't cover the enemies, which limits insight into the latter. For a game like StS a lot of enemies are iconic in their obnoxious fuckery like the damned Snecko scrambling the costs of all your cards, Time Eater going "fuck you its my turn now" if you play too many cards, etc etc. Its enemies like that which make a player have to think a bit about making sure their deck is properly well-rounded, whose overpowered tricks necessitate you becoming as overpowered as possible as well.
 
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Well it's been a while so:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZDalw6r-XA
  1. Game got delayed past the October release date into December 2nd.
  2. However, this is only for current-gen + PC. The PS4/Xbone and Switch versions have been delayed to TBA. (So presumably past April 2023, as 2K's financial statements only mentioned PC + Xbox Series + Playstation 5 for releases).
  3. Also at this point Firaxis seems to have realized they accidentally spoiled who the post-game hero is in a trailer and are now a bit more lax to let people get a good look at them if they paused at the right time. It's Bruce Banner.

Also they're going be doing a series of animated prequel shorts starting Oct 31, presumably to help with the stopgap of marketing once they go through all the heroes.

Speaking of, they've gotten up to the customizable PC now, after doing Strange, Captain Marvel, Scarlet Witch, and Wolverine:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_UPaicwx2o

So all that's left on the horizon is showcases for Blade, Ghost Rider, Nico Minoru, and Magik.
 
Neat. I remember seeing a trailer on this a long while back, but I kinda ignored it after the massively horrible grift-fest that was the Avengers game (among many other issues with it). Worth looking at least if it's a tactical RPG.
 
Once again been a while, but this time with the news of "they have sent out press copies to outlets and various streamers/youtubers/etc and they're now posting":

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRQFeJOP73U
Eurogamer's preview article, a preview from a place that touches upon Steam Deck performance, and I imagine more will be posted by other places as they go up.
And a new trailer to summarize the Abbey side of things:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NiuqaiYpWE

And also started posting those prequel shorts:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdROhbPZyeE&t=130s

Oh, and, they've also now posted hero showcases for all base game heroes (except for the not quite secret 13th one) that can be viewed on their youtube channel, along with announcing the season pass heroes - Deadpool, Venom, Storm, and yes, Morbius.
 
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