Marvel Midnight Suns: Firaxis unveils the Nico vs. Chthon showdown Marvel fans have been waiting for!

Well, that’s interesting!

I will wait and see if there’s a Tom Chick review or stream, those might sell me on it.

If I didn’t have to make the 2-hour refund decision, I might have dinked around in it some more, but I have a ton of games I love at this time!

Maybe in a year during the 2023 Steam holiday sale…

Unrelated.

EDIT: I didn’t mean for that to sound so flippant! Basically, this isn’t XCOM at all. I was pretty shocked myself! The gameplay is based on card-battling rogue-likes with a super-dense shell of Marvel theming wrapped around it.

I thought this was a squad based game like Xcom, except with super heroes? I know it has a card mechanics.

It’s important in this case to know WHY the reviews are bad - I think most people are angry about the cosmetic costume shop stuff (currently the costumes from the Legendary edition can be purchased with real money), and the performance issue stuff (which is 100% alleviated by bypassing the 2K launcher with a command inserted into the game’s launch properties) and some folks are bouncing off the writing/between mission stuff.

The gameplay/combat is excellent so far, though.

Not at all, and you really shouldn’t sweat the light/dark system this early in the game. Whatever you decide is just one teensy factor in a long-term proposition, and there will be plenty of +1’s here and -2’s there before anything meaningful happens.

It seems to me like the light/dark system is a counterbalance to the friendship system. Normally, for gameplay purposes, you would pick whatever response you think will give you the most friendship points with a character, because that’s how you unlock their combo cards over the long-term. But with the light/dark system, sometimes your longer term goal might be pushing the light/dark balance instead.

So that means you get dialogues where you have to choose between friendship points and your alignment choice. It’s not just a bunch of dumb “pick whatever you feel like saying, s’all good, wheeee!” dialogue options; it’s actual gameplay, albeit over a long-term slow drip.

So, anyway, all that is to say you shouldn’t worry about the light/dark system until way later in the game, at which point it will have been surfaced more. You’ll eventually have a clearer sense for when you might pick an alignment choice and when you might try to pick the best choice for your intercourse partner.

(Not like that. Y’all get your minds out the cutter. What me and Captain Marvel have is pure.)

BTW, if you want to see where the light/dark progression is tracked, open the character screen and choose the “Profile” tab on the left. In the bottom right corner, there’s a How To Play box, and on the PC, it tells you to press R for “More Info”. You’ll find a lot of helpful stuff on this screen, and there’s one of these screens for each hero. But for the player character hero – John Hunter or whatever his dumb name is – you’ll see additional info about the light/dark spectrum.

As the player character hero clarifies in a quick conversation with Blade, their name is simply “The Hunter”. Of course Blade makes a joke about that. ;)

See my thread comments above about the reviews. Most have little to do with the actual gameplay itself. It’s about performance, micro transactions, and anti-piracy software, and the odd person here and there who read nothing about the game and thought they were getting an X-Com clone.

And it was worse, it’s now in the mid 60’s, it was in the mid 50’s soon after release.

Wait. So is this game light on combat, or is just the initial gameplay a Marvel dorm simulation? I like Marvel. I like the idea of a tactical card battler. I am not so excited about a teenage social game.

I think this is underselling it. The addition of movement around a 2D space and all the environmental interactions makes this a much more tactical affair than your average card-battler.

On a different note, spider-man is…well…amazing. I have planned to utilize him as a mainstay, but after adding him to the roster, that plan could change. His animations are wonderful and I love the snarky banter.

Forgot to mention: I didn’t expect the Xcom push-pull from mission selection during the strategy layer. E.g. I’d love to pick a mission with an Intel cache, but I’m in desperate need of artifacts to analyze to get research level up.

Not at all, and I love the system too. I can understand people thinking that the strategy (abbey) layer is dominant in the early hours because they are throwing so many systems at you. I think that is what Tom was getting at about stuff being easy enough to skip once you are familiar with it.

The dynamically generated comics covers are emblematic of the way this game can be janky and even dangerously close to maximum derpitude, but they manage to salvage a dorky and endearing little feature out of it. The comics are an extension – they might actually be a direct copy, come to think of it – of the propaganda posters in XCOM 2. After a mission, based on the mission parameters, a comic book cover is dynamically generated. More often than not, it’s going to look silly, but you can tell what they’re going for. Here’s the mission I just played:

Risible, right? Well, if you care, you can use these covers as artwork to hang around your base. But perhaps you take some pride in your base and you don’t want that derpy looking clip-art jumble hovering over you. In which case, here’s how that “Edit Photo” button in the lower left corner can help:

Still kinda derpy, still obviously a rudimentary clip art program, but it was trivially easy for me to tweak what had been created, stick that thought bubble into the mix, and add it to my collection. Here are a couple of others I’ve made, by which I mean I’ve iterated on what was dynamically generated to make it look better. This one shows off one of the better filter effects on the character models:

Here’s another one I kind of like, again just tweaking the elements I was provided.

You can get a lot more elaborate with arranging, posing, and rotating the character models, which I don’t think you could do in XCOM? Unfortunately, you can’t write your own text, so you’re stuck tabbing through random, random, random, random, random, random until you find something that seems to fit. I guess otherwise all the posters would be dick jokes and 420 references and Captain Marvel/Hunter slashfic, and we can’t have that, since this is a multiplayer game with a playerbase composed mostly of minors. Oh, wait, no it isn’t. Maybe because it’s a Disney property? I dunno. Frankly, I’m okay with not having to think up what my superhero is going to say or what I’m going to title this issue.

So I’d encourage everyone to post some of their better Midnight Suns comics covers, but only if you also talk about the game! For each comic book cover you post, you must also add some observation about the gameplay! Otherwise, Caretaker will come in here and scold you.

I do wonder why they couldn’t let us do it the same way as XCom2 where you can take screenshots of the battlefield and have those be the backgrounds (maybe with some kind of “comic” filter applied). My best guess would be because they aren’t traversable 3D spaces, but you’d think they could have constrained the camera inside the arena.

Exactly. And you’re absolutely right about the early hours being crammed with systems exposition. It’s very nearly a JRPG in that regard. Definitely reminds me of my time trying to play Persona 5, the difference for me being that it’s NOT easy to skip past all that stuff in Persona 5 because all that stuff arguably is Persona 5.

But anyway, @misguided’s point is an important one: don’t make too many assumptions about the game based on the early glut of Marvel front-end and bloated systems exposition. It gets better!

Unfortunately, all of a sudden none of my game save would work. It appears that the Epic Game launcher failed and I could not get back into it.

I had to uninstall the Launcher, reinstall but than the thing got stuck on updating. Finally was able to get it to load by running the launcher in Admin mode.

All my Epic games disappeared. I am presently re-installing Midnight Suns hopefully my save files are still present otherwise I have to start over.

@Scotch_Lufkin, never second guess your dreams:

Not quite what you were dreaming of, but I thought about your post when this popped up in the research queue. :)

That kinda freaks me out lol!

I’m certain they are still there. See my experience earlier. I bet it made a new save folder, so it looked like your files were gone.

A big reason I need to get research level increased. The passive on that suit is fantastic (passives from suits are not tied to that suit, fyi.)

I’m so confused. I thought this game was literally XCom swapped with superheroes.

Card battling mechanics? Do you have a deck? I’m horrendous with deck building games.

It’s a deck game but there’s an 8 card limit so that makes it relatively easier to build a deck heh

I’m not sure why people refer to it in this way. Mass Effect for example had conversations and interactions and even romances with companions and no one called it a “ teenage social game”.

You have companions, and there are things you can do with them to boost relationships, and in the end gain stat boosts, abilities, and other stuff.

I’d recommend watching a game play video if you are wondering if the social aspects are not your cup of tea.

Have you been asleep since the game was announced? This has been known on day one!