Carry on my Midnight Suns
Yesterday we got a brief glimpse of what exactly when are in store for when the first turn-based strategy RPG featuring Marvel characters comes our way early next year.
Midnight Suns is a turn-based strategy RPG from the minds behind the recent X-Com games, Firaxis, but it’s quite different from those previous efforts as yesterday’s reveal showed. Midnight Suns features a hub where you’ll build relationships with established Marvel heroes and engage in other activities between battles, but also most interestingly the game has a heavy basis in card systems.
I’ll be upfront here and say I am not a fan of card-based video games or even minigames for that matter. I always give them a try when they are embedded in games I’m enjoying but at best I never stick with them and often I just find them annoying. Video games completely built around having a card deck I like even worse as often I feel like you get completely screwed running out of certain kinds of cards at just the worst times and while in other types of games you’d have other options in ones based entirely around cards you often don’t.
It remains to be seen just exactly how integral the card system actually is to combat, but it seems more like these cards, especially since they are randomly dealt out at the beginning of each battle, are more meant to give you some kind of edge whether it be through buffs or special attacks rather than something you are entirely dependent on so I think that can work. I’ll remain cautiously optimistic.
The other part shown during the gameplay reveal of Midnight Suns was “The Abbey” where you will spend downtime between battles and form relationships with the heroes (but no romance, because god forbid Marvel characters have romances in video games that aren’t even canon or something). This sounds potentially cool but it’ll all come down to the writing and how it affects gameplay, and that’s not really something Firaxis has tackled before to my knowledge so it’ll be interesting to see how they do. I really enjoyed that aspect of Fire Emblem so I’m hoping this is at least somewhat comparable.
Midnight Suns has another gameplay reveal coming next week but unless that reveals something significant that hasn’t already been covered I doubt I’ll be writing that up. But hopefully, it will give us a better idea of how exactly the card system figures into battles. In the meantime, I remain pretty excited for Midnight Suns and I hope this is a sign of Disney continuing to let video game developers try new and interesting ideas with their properties. That’s all for now, see ya real soon!
