In a deep-dive livestream today, Caroline Guevara Producer, Jake Solomon Creative Director and Garth Deangelis Franchise Producer demonstrated Midnight Suns in action. Kicking off at The Abbey, a brand-new superhero headquarters — designed in partnership with Marvel — the stream shows off some of the third-person exploration gameplay briefly, before diving into combat.
Solomon explained that the inclusion of The Abbey was very important for the team as they felt Midnight Suns needed something “that reflected what we all knew and loved when we were kids with Marvel; Avenger’s Tower, X-men and the X Mansion. Now having your own base is such a staple that you need to do in a Marvel game.”
Deangelis added, “Ours is a big part of the game, how it comes alive and how you live with these heroes.” Leaving The Abbey behind to tackle a combat mission, Hunter, Blade and Dr Strange enter what Firaxis calls Limbo. An interdimensional space between realities. By using portals created by Magik, players are able to travel to their missions, wherever they may be.
Midnight Suns Gameplay Deep Dive
Once the mission kicks off, Solomon and Deangelis immediately touched on the fact that Midnight Suns’ combat is card-based. They were keen to stress that although there are cards and it may appear vastly different from other games Firaxis has developed, Midnight Suns isn’t an altogether different beast. What the cards do is represent each heroes unique abilities and players bring each of those into the missions. The cards are then dealt to the player throughout the mission.
Deangelis and Solomon reveal that “there aren’t that many” abilities, so players have a good chance of seeing them all during a mission. There are three types of abilities; attack, skill and heroic. Attacks are pretty self-explanatory while skills can add buffs to your character, debuff enemies etc.
By playing skills and attacks, your heroes build up a resource called Heroism. Heroism is spent to play Heroic cards which are devastating attacks that can apply status changes to enemies and shift the tide of battle.
While Midnight Suns is a fast-paced strategy game, Solomon and Deangelis stress that it is quite deep. Heroes play wildly different from each other and by using synergies between heroes and developing relationships with other heroes at The Abbey, players will unlock a huge number of cards, abilities and strategies.
Following a brief look at combat against some Hydra goons, Sabretooth rocks up to take down the Hunter courtesy of a bounty put on her by Crossbones. Luckily, Wolverine is on the scene so the two of them can take down baddie together.
Check out the video above for 20 minutes of gameplay and a great, detailed breakdown by the team.
Midnight Suns will be available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series S|X n March 2022.
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