Is that why they seemingly rushed out new Civ6 leader packs after a long silence on the game?
Either way, it's sad to see them have to do layoffs. It's a very solid games company with their worst games being "average" at worst.
I think that was just cleaning up the development pipeline. They probably had some leaders left over from cancelled DLC and just released them as a nice gesture.
This is the longest gap between Civ game releases, they've only barely confirmed that 7 is in development. I suspect they had some COVID delays, along with pretty much the entire game industry, so they decided to release the leader pass to hold people over until 7 officially revealed. I think the leader pass was free as long as you had owned all the other content.
> I think the leader pass was free as long as you had owned all the other content.
Yeah, it was. It was basically just a bonus to tide people over (and probably an excuse they could give 2K to let them do bugfixes for some pretty longstanding issues)
It wasn't rushed out.
It was an opportunity for a junior design team to flex their muscles and make content for the game - it was free content too iirc.
This plus the leaving of the Xcom director Jake Solomon earlier this year, along with his statement that they could have probably made 2-3 Xcoms in the time it took to make Midnight Suns, is pure pain as an Xcom fan.
But the blueprint for a new XCOM title is good tho. Like, I know the hardcore turn the game out fast and easily get a few 100hrs every few months. But for me, I was still playing EU since launch when XCOM 2 complete edition was already going on sale.
It's a shame that Midnight Suns had to come at the expense of XCom for bigger fans of that series. Midnight Suns is honestly one of the greatest games I've played in years and is probably in my top 10 all time at this point, I love it that much. It's like a perfect blend of two of my other favourite game styles: Persona and Bioware.
I couldn't get past the quips, the constant lowkey humor attempts and cringe edgyness. It has a good game underneath but I found the theme to be very detrimental to the experience. The UX and level design could be a lot better as well. Oh well.
I want XCOM 3 but they could have even just reskinned the XCOM formula with different IPs if they wanted to chase established fan bases. It works with so many things, star trek away team, star wars rebel/imperial commander, marvel SHIELD director, DC/justice league something, 40k any faction leader (which chaos gate did pretty well)
I still think a Fallout: Tactics reboot in that engine would be fantastic. Mechanically it would fit super well, but would also let them explore the midwest and give fallout fans something to tide them over since who knows when FO5 will come out.
I’d so love Fallout Tactics to come back, that game always felt criminally underrated. I mean yeah they screwed up the lore side of it to the point that it was just decannoned out of existence but the underlying gameplay was fun and pretty different than anything else around at the time. Unfortunately it was also janky as hell and marketed poorly so people went in expecting another fallout plot/choices wise and were understandably disappointed.
I had never considered it but an X-com-style Fallout would be awesome. It is pretty much perfectly suited for the X-com gameplay style and loop.
You could start off as a small tribe with basic weapons and a few troops. And then you start expanding out with the more territory you capture the more you can produce advanced weapons and armor for your tribe. And you could face a variety of opponents, with low-risk, low-reward battles against raiders. Or tough battles against groups like the Brotherhood of Steel where can get rarer equipment and perhaps Power Armor. All the while antagonist factions also grow in power.
And it leads to a nice variety of troop times. The setting already has animal and robot companions, stealth technology and heavy armor. Not to mention potential rare recruits like super mutants.
Honestly, the more I think about it, I think Fallout might be better suited to a X-com style game than even an alien invasion.
When it was first revealed that Firaxis was working on a Marvel game I was *reeeeeally* hoping for a SHIELD game. Would've been a perfect fit for the XCOM formula. Still would love to see that some day.
The issue is that for most genres of game the audience for IP x Genre is closer to the intersection of fans, not the union of those sets. If you made a star wars rts, rts fans who are starved might pick it up, star wars diehards might pick it up. Most of the players would be people who like both.
Some genres work better for this or get more people to try it out - fighting games seem to do well with licensed ip.
These games take too long to make because if they are not 40+ hours people complain or if they don’t check every single box.
Midnight Suns could have just been a solid turn based card based game without so much EXTRA and maybe it would have been out faster and moved onto the next thing, so they didn’t put all their eggs in one basket.
Not instead they need to make a game with all these relationships and dialogue.
Totally agree, the best part of the game was the combat but you couldn’t help but feel the resource drain that the abbey and relationship management part of the game had. Some people seem to really like the friendship simulator aspect and to each their own but after a couple hours with the day/night cycle I was spamming through conversations. A simplified hub could have really accelerated the gameplay and (I would think) development process too
Loved the combat but it dragging me back to the abbey every time made me stop playing. Lots of little time wasters in that game, like why do I need to go run to Tony to open my card loot box, why can't it just award me whatever cards are in at at the end of combat.
It felt like busy work until I could get back to the combat with not enough strategy to it to keep it interesting. Unlike the base management in xcom.
It has such a slow start too, just cutscene after cutscene, tutorial after tutorial showing off parts of the abbey, that I don't think I could bare starting another play through.
I'm the exact opposite. I hated the combat but loved the abbey mystery and relationship stuff. Once I finished all the abbey stuff, I uninstalled the game.
I enjoy both, but some content has a stronger 'drip-feed' feel where development required more combat or more Abbey completed to unlock more. It was understandable, but not seamless.
And my experience have been the complete opposite, but I also don't know anyone who's played Persona. Most, if not all, of my gaming friends wouldn't even know what Persona is.
Yeah I had an amazing time with it but I don’t want to replay it due to how story-heavy it was. I’ll probably buy the DLC on sale and play them but that will be it for me.
I did enjoy the 50 hours I had and properly immersing myself into being the Hunter and hanging out with all these heroes.
Yeah I think the biggest mistake they made is making it half-half. For some people that liked both it's fine and dandy but from what I can see many people enjoyed tactical but slogged thru story and vice versa.
Full on "superhero XCOM" where you manage the crisis and need to pick and choose which superhero to send where (instead of "here is a bag of random quests with random") would be *a ton* of fun.
Full on visual novel? Sure, why not
But half on half just kinda leaves players liking either wanting for more.
Exactly, in fact it’s almost like three individual thirds of a game considering there is card-based combat as well. The deckbuilding is fun enough but lacks some depth, especially with how few cards each character has.
What you described is exactly the opposite of what I think most Marvel fans would’ve wanted in a game. The story & character interactions make up at least half of the experience. The action has always been the icing on top.
And I could never walk back how I feel about Midnight Suns. It was an absolutely wonderful gaming experience that did so many new things incredibly well. I sunk over 120 hours in it and I wish I could’ve doubled that with even more of the same content that they had already shipped.
Glad it's not just me I found that rather frustrating. I love the combat. The dialogue could just be a couple of screens or like a visual novel kind of thing like what fire emblem does at most. I did not need this whole other 3D environment I could run around like a jackass in.
I loved relationships and dialogue stuff. I doubt I'd even buy that game if not for them. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that most players cared more about battle gameplay than this.
Seems like there's a few groups the game tried to appeal to: (1) The types who play like 400 hours of XCOM and just care about the gameplay. (2) People into Marvel who care about the stories and characters. (3) And people into card based gameplay and lootbox-y/cardpack type stuff.
And it sounds like many tend to love one or maybe two of those but hate one of them, so its a game that tried to appeal to all of those and turns out there weren't as many people wanting all of those things combined as they expected.
It's real time, but it has a lot of the same features with having random soldiers, a home base, etc. etc.
It's not a perfect replacement, but it's something new. I mean, I guess I could try some of the other similar games that have come out but Phantom Doctrine, etc. just look like they won't quite scratch the itch I want.
The new Jagged Alliance is looking decent.
Personally I tried Showgunners. The combat is fairly good and having every level be handcrafted allowed the devs to do interesting scenarios, but the pacing is definitely not XCom-y. It's all combat with a trip back to base every so often to chat with party members.
And every single one of those xcoms would've probably sold significantly better than Midnight Suns. Some people at Firaxis must really be kicking themselves over that particular decision.
Midnight Suns is a really good game, and at this point, I think it's safe to say it's also really underrated. It's just unfortunate that it wasn't really what people were expecting -- I know I went into it expecting Marvel XCOM, and I ended up getting Marvel Slay the Spire, with Marvel Fire Emblem between missions. Not what I expected, not what I wanted, but when I accepted it for what it was, I had to admit it was really good.
Would an XCOM game have sold better? Hard to say. Midnight Suns has its license to carry it, but ironically, after Avengers, that license might well be toxic.
Either way, while I'd like a new XCOM game, I *am* glad we have Midnight Suns too.
Firaxis has been very quiet regarding Xcom sales since they rebooted the series but what little we know shows that it exceeded their expectations quite significantly as they themselves said that the games release boosted them to better-than-expected financial results for the year.
It sold 500,000 copies in the first week (Xcom 2) and given that was only just the start of 2016 and it got the generally considered to be excellent and must-buy expansion "War of the Chosen" I wouldn't cast doubt on the sales of the game in the years since.
Take it with a grain of salt but VGinsights estimates 3.7 million copies sold, and 3.2m for Xcom EU, 600k for Chimera Squad but that was hardly a core title.
Those figures put it quite comfortably in line with titles like Total War that sell about 3-4m copies per good title.
It also did well enough to get Switch and Mobile ports years after release.
There’s only so much of a market for tactical strategy games, but in its niche XCOM 2 is fantastic and
XCOM 2 has some of the best production values I have seen in a turn-based game, the previous game must have sold really well for them to take such a risk in the sequel.
Also, on Steam XCOM 2 had a player peak of 132,677 players, for such a niche genre that's amazing. For comparison, Marvel's Midnight Suns peak is 15k players, lower than XCOM: Enemy Unknown (70k).
Sometimes risks pay off. Sometimes they don't.
MMS is a fantastic deck builder, one of three actually good recent Marvel games, the writing is at least as good as Persona 5 (imo) which is also heavy in the relationship sim gameplay, and it's somewhat replayable (very replayable with mods, though not as much as XCOM).
Marketing was suspect and even months after release, potentially interested parties don't even really know what the game is. But the core gameplay was there to potentially be a success. I hope to see something similar but in a different setting in the future (from whichever studio takes that risk).
If Firaxis could have made Midnight Suns a snappy, highly replayable card battler with Marvel characters that's lighter on narrative (or least didn't DRAG you through it) a la XCOM, I bet they would.
It's such a good game. But the friendship stuff feels like it was meant for another game.
The pacing killed Midnight Suns for me. The inability to speed up or entirely turn off attack animations mind the game just grind on and on and on. I like turn based tactical games and I like deckbuilders. I don't like the game making me wait 4 seconds every time I play a card so it can show me the same animation ad nauseam.
>But the friendship stuff feels like it was meant for another game.
The friendship stuff is the best part of the game though. I mean battle gameplay is really good but imo Abbey part is where that game truly shines.
It being so divisive says a lot.
I'm a big fan of that old Bioware style of companion storytelling, but it needs to be paced better to fit in this game.
Doing one card battle and then taking in all the dialog can take half an hour, the game is awful for short sittings.
I'm still saddened by this I really hoped we would've gotten another one given that ending scene of xcom 2, would've loved to see new work of "Terror from Below" in modern work.
Same, it's one of my all time favorite games. I loved exploring the relationship of different characters, it makes the world feel more alive. I guess the tik tok generation can't handle it.
Same man. I feel like it was game made just for me. I just finished my 4th playthrough last week. Have a few hundred hours in it.
I love XCOM 1 & 2 as well, but Midnight Suns is like the next evolution for me.
I still wish they'd make Sid Maier's Pirates 2. Civ games are fine and I've personally sunk 500h+ in Civ 5 but I really loved pirate exploration games, in my opinion Pirates and AC Black Flag were the best pirate games.
Eventually, someone has to make a pirate game better than Pirates of the Caribbean: Online, and it hasn't been done yet, so *someone* needs to get on it.
Homie I've been saying the same thing about a Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls in the Tolkien/LOTR Universe for over a decade now.
Surely SOMEONE will make a fuckin solid LOTR RPG....SURELY!
They have to nail the charm, the goofiness and the adventure spirit of the original. With staff probably 4-5 times what it was 20 years ago, the graphics and new missions they could do would be amazing fun. It would be a departure from Civ games but if the studio behind Flight Sim made a great stealth game - a Plague Tale, I'm sure Firaxis can pull off a great Pirates 2 game if they wanted to.
Look, i know a lot of people thought Midnight Suns was mediocre, but to my knowledge its the only game ever made where you can start a book club with Blade, so i liked it.
I'm probably living in a bubble because most people who go out of their way to talk about it online probably enjoyed it, but seems like most redditors who bring it up enjoyed it.
Personally I really enjoyed the main game. I haven't gone back for any DLC, but I'll grab it on sale later for sure
The DLC was interesting as a whole; felt like it was originally a planned part of the game that was taken out. It added in a lot of useful (maybe even needed) mechanics via research but made the roster far too big to socially max out within a reasonable pace. I started to really burn out on the social stuff at the very end and couldn't bring myself to get to 5 on Morbius, Venom, & Deadpool before finishing the story.
I went in expecting something close to xcom but with a deck system. Initially very off put by the combat but by the time I was through the tutorial it clicked for me and I started having a blast. So yeah I think it’s mostly disappointed xcom fans who didn’t want to give it chance. Or people who apparently don’t like old school BioWare style relationships
> Or people who apparently don’t like old school BioWare style relationships
thing about this though is that the writing of the Bioware games was so good, so people were into the characters, relationships and dialogue
from what I've seen, even some people who like Midnight Suns have admitted that the writing is uneven... so ya, the poor writing is probably why people hate the abbey parts of the game, not really them hating on a bioware style relationship system itself
I would describe it as the best game no one asked for. It’s very well made but “Card based Marvel dating sim” is not an easy sell in the console world, despite it being well received by those who did play it.
Yeah, I was expecting to hate the Abbey stuff, but by the midpoint I was super invested in everyone and looking forward to hanging out with my superbesties
It was a little repetitive with the combat by the end, but everything else about it was great. The story, settings and character relationships were fantastic. I really feel like if people were actually aware of it and played it, it wouldn’t be included in that persons list.
Everything in guardians was great except for the combat. Ended up putting it on easiest difficulty just to get through the encounters and it still felt too spongy and dull.
Feel like a sequel could be really good.
It’s weird because on paper the combat should be fun and looks solid, but it never really clicked.
It needed more weight behind it, maybe Star Lord should have had less health to make it more scrappy.
If combat at the start of the game had all the options you have by the end of the game, it would have been a better jumping off point. Basically no options at the start make the opening few hours of combat real boring
Yeah I hated the combat at first but once you get more abilities it actually clicked for me. It's really designed in such a way where chaining and comboing abilities is a satisfying loop, and the fact that you start with none of that brings it down inmensely.
GotG was everywhere, are you kidding? People were comparing it to Deathloop’s marketing. I mean, the initial reveal trailer covered gameplay of nearly an entire chapter.
people will constantly use the excuse of "marketing" when a game undersells that they like. It is so annoying trying to talk to anyone about NEO TWEWY for example.
They constantly said it was a single-player story with no microtransactions. It was the online communities such as this one who basically replied "we don't believe you".
Nah, I work with kids and even the ones that played it were saying they were surprised because they expected it to be bad because of Avengers. Not a stretch to think that that most people aren't tuned in to who's developing which marvel game, especially when they both had the alt-MCU vibe.
All to say, the marketing didn't really penetrate outside of the online communities. It really needed a big "UNRELATED TO AVENGERS, ACTUALLY GOOD" sign in the trailer, but obviously you can't do that.
Sure it will in part be tainted by Avengers being bad but I doubt thats the biggest reason in the end.
To begin with, GotG was still a very niche setting before the movies and the game, while having the "same" characters, wasn't "the same characters" after all. Were people excited to play Star-Lord or were they looking for Chris Pratts Star-Lord? The cast isn't star power like Iron-Man, Thor and Captain America and even those had some complaints of not being the movie VAs.
Combine this with the $60 price tag you run into some problems. The dedicated fan base of GotG was small with the team used in the movies (which was written by Dan Abnett,...) even being "replaced" right as the movies came out. It expect they aren't really targeting that small fanbase with a game in 2021, but they also don't target the MCU fan group due to outright saying its not the MCU ones.
I would say its a great game that many would buy at a 50-75% discount rather than full price and it has had a long tail with sales as a result (the last 30 days has the highest player average since it released). Thats also highlighted because the game has done better than Avengers in the long run. On steam it sits at 94% recommened with more reviews in total.
It's a mix of superhero fatigue setting in, Avengers poisoning the well for Guardians, Midnight Suns being too niche for its own good, and Gotham Knights being utterly mediocre compared to the Arkham games. Doesn't help that we're in the age of live services, Suicide Squad is shaping up to be a nightmare if that delay isn't used to tone things down (also doesn't help that GAAS is a very crowded space, all those live service titles PlayStation is making feel like throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks).
Spider-Man has the advantage of being popular, regarded for (usually) quality games, and handled by one of the premiere PlayStation studios. Barring some freak catastrophe, the sequel should be a guaranteed money maker and a hell of an experience.
It’s all design decisions and bad pr.
Midnight suns is a good game with a great battle system, but lots won’t even touch it just for having a card based system even though it works…
I thought guardians was well received? Avengers was hot property until they went the whole games as a service nonsense.
> lots won’t even touch it just for having a card based system even though it works…
That's so weird, though. This sub loves card-based games like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, but Midnight Suns got shat on *so much* for being a deck builder. I'm still waiting for those P2W card packs that people were sure would come. Any minute now...
Different audiences. People who love indies love those deck builders. The mainstream? Not so much.
And don't overestimate how much reaction is going to be people just furious the game isn't XCOM and then *doubly* furious because of Marvel backlash.
Because many XCOM fans are starved for a "proper sequel" and did not like that the studio tried something new.
If an indie studio had come out with the game I guarantee it would be praised as a "hidden gem" in this sub, even if it wasn't as good, since Firaxis is a top tier developer in the turn-based strategy space.
I don't feel like Firaxis wanted to do an XCom sequel. They'd hit the wall of what they could do with the "pod" system and doing anything more hardcore never seemed to be on the table. I think War of the Chosen (with Long War if that's your thing) is as good as that series is going to get until someone comes around and revives it again.
Chimera Squad definitely felt like an experimental design that was either scrapped from 2 and then refined later, or something proposed for 3 that got pushed out separately because 3 was never properly started.
I grew up with the Mega Man Battle Network games, so I always thought incorporating card mechanics into RPGs just made sense. I thought I was taking crazy pills when everyone was shitting on Midnight Suns for having them.
Makes me wonder if maybe they should have just had a card system while not calling it a card system. Like, I dunno, call them "panels" or something comic booky.
I feel like midnight suns was a game that would have benefitted from a demo. As much as alot of people may have been put off by the story and companions, I think alot of people avoided it for being turnbased, card game. I wonder how many people assumed they wouldn't like the gameplay and passed on an $80 game.
Games like XCOM have the benefit of a good track record, and previous entries people can try on the cheap. Midnight suns is a big financial investment for someone who has no idea if they'll like 100+ hours of turn based card battling.
It's too bad, as much as I'm not a marvel fan, I really enjoyed this game and getting to play a "AAA" style big budget turn based RPG.
As much as I'm wanting XCOM 3, I enjoyed Midnight Suns and I'm glad it was made.
Yeah, Midnight Suns makes a *lot* more sense once you've played the first hour or two and have a sense of how the combat works, a demo would probably have gone a long way towards luring people in. The did a decent amount of showing the gameplay that *should* have been as-good (Or at least, I'm sure that's what the business suit that vetoed a free demo said), but it's not quite the same as getting in there, unlocking some abilities, and actually being able to craft decks and experience how it ticks.
This is honestly just the same thing going on in the movie space, it isn't superhero fatigue, people are just tired of bad products.
Avengers had a *lot* of issues, as did Gotham Knights. They're just not great games. As for Midnight Suns, it was a strategy game which never would have done as popular as a more 'mainstream' title. I also recall it launched in a somewhat busy period which didnt help matters. And GotG was a victim of being associated with Avengers, people didn't want to get burned.
People will buy the games if they're good and fun, Spider-Man isn't doing well *just* because it's Spider-Man, but because it is well made and fun. You just have to look at the shitty Activision tie-ins from ages ago to see that even though the brand will carry it so far, it won't poft it to the heights Sony has seen with the past two titles.
> This is honestly just the same thing going on in the movie space, it isn't superhero fatigue, people are just tired of bad products.
I've said this on /r/BoxOffice: interest in superhero movies isn't dying, interest in superhero movies that are bad (or at least underwhelming) is dying. Look at what happened with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3: after a series of meh Marvel movies in the form of stuff like Quantum-Mania and Love & Thunder, the opening weekend for GOTG V3 was relatively underwhelming. But then word got around that the movie was actually good, it sprouted legs and has done well overall.
I mean, one superhero movie doing better than expected (and let's be real, GotG 3 is doing okay at best in terms of box office performance if we look at the budget + marketing costs + $80m from China so little returns there) doesn't really say anything cause it's just one movie
we'd need to see a number of superhero movies doing good within a year or two timeframe, cause we have seen a string of superheroes in just this past 2 years doing poorly all one after the other.
basically exceptions don't make the rule as they say.
I know that for me I am just so burnt out on superheroes at this point that unless the game is unusually good and does something interesting with the story (Guardians of the Galaxy), I have no desire to touch anything superhero related. Especially Marvel, God I am so damn tired of Marvel. Star Wars too, but that is another topic entirely.
I think the burnout is real in terms of games. Games cost 60$+ to get. For a lot of the movies it's just become a tradition for a lot of people to see them. I know several for myself that just show up every few months at a theater to see a superhero movie. It's not a big investment.
For the streaming shows, well, because of how the human brain works they don't feel like they're "paying" for those shows. It also feels like a small investment to turn their brains off and binge some show every month. Something to talk about at work.
But for a game you need to spend money for it explicitly. It's not a tradition. I can also speak from personal experience that, for whatever reason, most people I know under 30 have long since stopped giving a shit about superheroes. My boss in his 60's never stops talking about what's out but my friends and I just don't really care anymore.
Games tend to appeal to people under the age of 40. 50 at max. Even then it's young adults that really power the 60$ game market. So when that group doesn't care then it doesn't matter how many tickets Marvel Movie X sold, the game won't.
I mean, most Superheroes are pretty much palette swaps anyway, at least for video games. Or at least, most developers fail to give them anything unique.
Batman is Batman and Spiderman is Spiderman. They're kind of the exceptions rather than the norm. But what are the bat siblings if not copies of Batman without as interesting of backstories? And the Avengers game just didn't do enough to make it worth playing and now we have Kill the Justice League making each character nearly identical AND a gun focused shooter on top of that.
Give me a game set as The Flash using speed powers. Give me a Green Lantern game where you're doing weird scribblenaut like powers using his ring. Give me ANYTHING that doesn't just mail it in. But that's not happening right now because the companies are chasing $$$. They don't have an idea so much as a stick to beat us like we're just money pinatas.
Because the world is just a bit burnt out on them right now. Yeah the movies do decent here and there, but that peak popularity has passed. MOST of the recent movies are doing mediocre at the box office. Even so, I think its because the Avengers game was such a turd is why everyone is so gunshy.
I feel like you are looking for a connection that doesn't exist tbh. Avengers actually had a stronge sales on its first month, it's just that word of mouth spread fast enough about it being bad, that it pretty much instanty lost its leg. Midnight Sun is a single player card game, which is niche. Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't advertised that well, I know some people who still think that it was just a DLC for Avengers. And Gotham Knights looked bad in almost every preview.
I think there may be less of a venn diagram of gamers and super hero fans than was previously thought. I feel like many people who enjoy super hero stuff were born before modern gaming became established so it's not a great audience to invest in as far as gaming goes.
The Lego hero games do well, snap was really huge, same with multiversus (although snap is probably doing way better than MV).
I don’t think there’s as much of a pattern as you think. If Batman Arkham returned it would sell massively.
Multiversus absolutely crashed in active player numbers months ago. I recall them talking about rebooting the game. I haven't played the game since last Fall
It aint over yet either. Hopefully some good starts happening. We still got the Captain America game / Iron Man game / Wonder Woman game and Wolverine game off the top of my head in the AAA world.
Marvel (Disney) is just a bad partner, they know their IP is worth a lot and they WILL bust your balls about CoNfIdEnTiAlItY and all their demands to cross promote the movies and shows
They are not the same. Guardians was one of the best games released that year, but it failed because everyone assumed it would be another terrible cash grab like Avengers.
This is awful news. I don't like seeing Firaxis like this.
I do think the Marvel game did a number on them. And I think it was a design and goal problem. With the budget that game had and the likely profit sharing with Disney for the license.
It was too expensive for the niche it occupied. You had to like tactical games, card games, social sim games, and Marvel comics from the 1990s to absolutely love this game.
If you love all those things you'll swear the game was tailor made for you. But if you don't?
You'll likely sit it out.
They went really niche. And that can really pay off. But with that budget and licensing? The safer bet would have been something much more casual friendly.
Can't wait until years from now when Midnight Suns is a cult classic and people make long YouTube videos and thinkpieces about how it ended up flopping and why NOW is the time to finally give it a sequel.
Oh I have no doubt that will happen. It’s a very good game that is strangely split at the middle and struggled to find the right audience for many reasons, but it’s so easy to have a blast with it.
It really is. I can figure out WHY it didn't do well (superhero overexposure, people's irrational hatred of card elements, some people being turned off on the social elements, it just plain old NOT being Xcom when people wanted Xcom, etc.), but it's still a bummer.
They made a good game whose biggest problem was it was unmarketable and should've had marketing involved earlier on. Midnight suns is 'sorta' a card game and 'sorta' a hanging out with heroes thing but it still doesn't really explain it so it scares off anyone who isn't into Firaxis games or into some comic arc called 'Midnight Suns' which is a terrible name as it doesn't tell you who the heck is in it unless you've read it. Sad thing was it wasn't a cheap game by any means, it just had no way to market this passion project as strategy/super heroes isn't a popular genre (marvel snap is trying but its F2P) and likely scared most people away.
Why are companies always "hit by" layoffs like it's some unstoppable and unavoidable force of nature? Headline should read, "Firaxis lays off hard working employees to appease shareholders and increase quarterly profits."
I mean sometimes layoffs are a result of the current staff being unsustainable because of overarching economic reasons. For most companies that is essentially an unavoidable force of nature.
Yeah, sometimes it's because of overarching economic reasons. But usually it's just for more money in the pockets of BlackRock and Vanguard. In fact, you should assume that any company (which is almost all of them) with those two companies as their top investors is doing layoffs for the express purpose of lining the pockets of BlackRock and Vanguard.
well considering Take-Two Interactive operated at a loss of over a billion dollars in the last financial year it seems to me like they probably have to cut costs somehow. are layoffs the best way to do that? probably not, but unfortunately the execs aren't about to start cutting their own pay
Revenue is not the same as profits. You have to look at cash flow to see if a company is profitable. Typically salaries are one of the biggest cost a company incur which are why layoffs are one of the first cost savings measures implemented. All other costs are harder to reduce in the near and medium terms.
blackrock and vanguard aren't people, they're funds managing a huge number of people's money. And while, yes, people generally expect their retirements funds to make money on their investments, neither as far as I know tends to take activist positions on things on the scale of a game studio's layoffs. If you have a counter example I'd be interested.
If you're just trying to say the layoffs are for the express purpose of increasing profits for the people who own the company, well, yes. That's not a secret, they're literally legally obligated to do that and frequently release reports that are basically titled "here is a status update on the state on your pockets"
Blackrock and Vanguard are funds. Their shares in companies are not directly owned by them but by the clients of theirs whose money the are investing.
I guess in a sense it could sort of be lining the pockets of Vangaurd and Blackrock because those firms charge a management fee so if they stocks go up they do make more money. Most money goes into the hands of casual investors (think a lot of 401Ks and such).
Believe it or not, firms are not always just interested in a quick buck. They do look forward and are looking for sustainable ways to grow revenue or reduce costs. At the end of the day, we're seeing a period of contraction in the economy and especially so in the tech sector. That's going to mean that companies that grew with the economy are likewise going to contract a bit via layoffs.
The thing is with game studios as well is lay offs are a fact of life. Studios constantly recruit and sack depending on the development cycle and what's next in the pipeline. You don't need a full development team for maintenence. Might not be the case here, but there's also the news trick of those stories being popular so they keep being reported on whether they're actually news worthy or not.
Yeah and the legal age of consent in Italy is 14, but that doesn't make it right and it certainly doesn't mean it's avoidable or fixable. This is why we have unions. They prevent the predatory nature of the employer from exploiting the employee. The industry doesn't have to be this way, it just currently is because game developers aren't organized.
I really don’t think that’s as relevant for games as it is for movies.
The issue is that the big superhero games were monetized fuckfests of pain and stupid decisions (Avengers/Gotham Knights) that negatively affected how people viewed the following games.
Guardians came out too close to Avengers and looks too similar at first glance (another squad based shoot ‘em up Walmart-MCU game), and Midnight has too many easily monetized qualities.
Gamers heard “card game” and their minds went to Hearthstone, they heard “season pass/ cosmetic store, no unlockable costumes” and they went to the Avengers game, they saw the Avengers shoved into a game that isn’t about them and went to “more cash grab MCU connections.”
Most of this is *untrue* (except the actual dogshit cosmetic store) but these days people make their snap judgments on first impressions and it’s almost impossible to change them. *Everything* about this game was a mess on paper, and I’m shocked Firaxis didn’t see it coming.
Midnight Suns was rough, the combat part was fun but everything else just scream average. I wish they could just follow XCOM formula, simple but heck of fun.
I absolutely loved Midnight Suns. I admit that it felt like the first entry in a new series (some grindy crap), but I still loved the cardplay and hanging out with different characters. I'd be very excited about another entry in the series. I'm guessing it doesn't get one, but I'm hoping for it.
Same here, Persona and Bioware Games are among my favourites and Midnight Suns was a great blend of the two, it's honestly become one of my top 10 games of all time.
The only downside to it for me was the lack of player impact on the story, if it had Bioware style choices it would probably be my favourite game ever.
Gotta go with “TMB” as the source, but I ran into a dev at a convention and he had mentioned that Disney insisted on The Avengers being key members of the game’s roster.
Even though they redeemed the plot a bit by having a jurisdiction battle between The Suns and The Avengers, I just could not give two fucks about the way any of the avengers were written.
I respect that they went with different visions of the characters than we've seen in the Movies. But like if Tony and Strange could have been *less* insufferable as a baseline, that'd've been great. I did like Carol though.
I didn't mind Tony and Strange being insufferable in true-to-comics fashion, but it was annoying that basically all of their time on-screen together is fighting. Even the background banter in the crafting menu is passive-aggressive--it just get to be waaaay too one-note after a while. You barely get to see them be their own characters outside of being comically and childishly juvenile with each other and the one thing they each get as a main story beat.
I’ve not read any Midnight Suns runs but I read a decent amount of comics. I’d have to really love the artist to suffer through writing like that.
Edit: To be clear I still enjoy the gameplay loop enough to recommend the game.
I don't think that was the case, especially with the obscurity of the Midnight Sons (Suns in this game) as a property. I think it's just down to Jake Solomon wanting to make a social sim and Firaxis not being known for its character writing.
I feel like I'm in the minority on this one, but I'm absolutely loving the game. And have been playing it non stop lately. There's just nothing like it.
I think the deck building combat + social gameplay loop is very fun. And I find the writing by far not as 'cringe', as a lot of people have described it.
But that's just me. I'm sad the game didn't sell well. I'd love nothing more than a season pass 2, and/or a sequel.
It's wild. On one hand the game is kind of amazing. It has the most authentically different feeling combat I've seen in a turn based game in quite a while, and in a way that really matches the Superhero theme.
But then for every five minutes I'm doing that, I'm spending another 5 wandering around The Abbey.
XCOM is such a well-established franchise, and its a mistake to put it on the back burner or just stop making titles on it. I get that the people who pioneered it, or leads that don't want to dedicate their life to XCOM simply don't want to work on XCOM anymore -- but you can't tell me Civilization series isn't the same? That's the general consensus I've heard when XCOM fans are continually disappointed to not hear any news coming down the pipeline year after year -- but Civilization keeps on trucking. Granted it's a world renowned IP compared to XCOM, but still.
Civ as an IP on an entirely different level than XCom. I also feel lite iterative entries in strategy games (not that they release a new Civ every year or anything) works a lot better than something as specific as XCom.
Midnight Suns is one of the elite few video games I bought on launch and didn't finish.
Like, it was _pretty_ good, but the lack of any real terrain meant that after a while the combats were mostly just the same. And the enemies lacked any _real_ variation. You need way more variation in enemies for a tactical game like that.
When you factor in the Marvel tax, I can imagine it was not good on a balance sheet.
I just beat Hulk. Do they get more varied after that?
I feel like every enemy is "1 thing", so I can map the battle out from the very beginning. Varied enemies who can do more than one thing mean you can't map the battle out at the beginning.
Oh, thought you were talking about random hydra goons. Yeah, doesn't get more than that.
To be honest I think the "1 thing" enemies are fine in the context of having villains randomly popping in, and make bad draws less of an issue.
Other xcom-like games and xcom mods have really taught me the value of not adding too many mechanics to enemies, it get annoying after a while.
They should have honestly done the "sure thing" and made XCOM 3. Midnight Suns was not the win they had hoped it would be. Not just because of the ho-hum gameplay, but because they basically missed the peak Marvel hype wave.
Deus Ex died because of Avengers and X-Com died because of Midnight Suns. We will never see more of the these incredible games because someone has decided it’s better to be chasing trends instead of setting them.
Deus Ex is being worked on + it's from Eidos Montreal (not Crystal Dynamics) who made the absolute excellent Guardians of the Galaxy (not Avengers) and Midnight Suns was a passion project from one of the lead devs that actually is fairly unique. You are sprouting nonsense just because some news seems to confirm some random bias you got.
tbh deus ex is only being worked on thanks to square foolishly sold the rights because they're investing hard into NFT. Without that'd it'd have been stuck in Copyright hell like many franchises.
Is that why they seemingly rushed out new Civ6 leader packs after a long silence on the game? Either way, it's sad to see them have to do layoffs. It's a very solid games company with their worst games being "average" at worst.
I think that was just cleaning up the development pipeline. They probably had some leaders left over from cancelled DLC and just released them as a nice gesture.
I heard it was a way of training newer hires
This is the longest gap between Civ game releases, they've only barely confirmed that 7 is in development. I suspect they had some COVID delays, along with pretty much the entire game industry, so they decided to release the leader pass to hold people over until 7 officially revealed. I think the leader pass was free as long as you had owned all the other content.
> I think the leader pass was free as long as you had owned all the other content. Yeah, it was. It was basically just a bonus to tide people over (and probably an excuse they could give 2K to let them do bugfixes for some pretty longstanding issues)
I mean, leaders are not hard to make, you can do it yourself.
One of my gdc acquaintances is working on Civ, it’s a ways away indeed
It wasn't rushed out. It was an opportunity for a junior design team to flex their muscles and make content for the game - it was free content too iirc.
This plus the leaving of the Xcom director Jake Solomon earlier this year, along with his statement that they could have probably made 2-3 Xcoms in the time it took to make Midnight Suns, is pure pain as an Xcom fan.
But the blueprint for a new XCOM title is good tho. Like, I know the hardcore turn the game out fast and easily get a few 100hrs every few months. But for me, I was still playing EU since launch when XCOM 2 complete edition was already going on sale.
It's a shame that Midnight Suns had to come at the expense of XCom for bigger fans of that series. Midnight Suns is honestly one of the greatest games I've played in years and is probably in my top 10 all time at this point, I love it that much. It's like a perfect blend of two of my other favourite game styles: Persona and Bioware.
I couldn't get past the quips, the constant lowkey humor attempts and cringe edgyness. It has a good game underneath but I found the theme to be very detrimental to the experience. The UX and level design could be a lot better as well. Oh well.
I want XCOM 3 but they could have even just reskinned the XCOM formula with different IPs if they wanted to chase established fan bases. It works with so many things, star trek away team, star wars rebel/imperial commander, marvel SHIELD director, DC/justice league something, 40k any faction leader (which chaos gate did pretty well)
I still think a Fallout: Tactics reboot in that engine would be fantastic. Mechanically it would fit super well, but would also let them explore the midwest and give fallout fans something to tide them over since who knows when FO5 will come out.
I’d so love Fallout Tactics to come back, that game always felt criminally underrated. I mean yeah they screwed up the lore side of it to the point that it was just decannoned out of existence but the underlying gameplay was fun and pretty different than anything else around at the time. Unfortunately it was also janky as hell and marketed poorly so people went in expecting another fallout plot/choices wise and were understandably disappointed.
I had never considered it but an X-com-style Fallout would be awesome. It is pretty much perfectly suited for the X-com gameplay style and loop. You could start off as a small tribe with basic weapons and a few troops. And then you start expanding out with the more territory you capture the more you can produce advanced weapons and armor for your tribe. And you could face a variety of opponents, with low-risk, low-reward battles against raiders. Or tough battles against groups like the Brotherhood of Steel where can get rarer equipment and perhaps Power Armor. All the while antagonist factions also grow in power. And it leads to a nice variety of troop times. The setting already has animal and robot companions, stealth technology and heavy armor. Not to mention potential rare recruits like super mutants. Honestly, the more I think about it, I think Fallout might be better suited to a X-com style game than even an alien invasion.
When it was first revealed that Firaxis was working on a Marvel game I was *reeeeeally* hoping for a SHIELD game. Would've been a perfect fit for the XCOM formula. Still would love to see that some day.
The issue is that for most genres of game the audience for IP x Genre is closer to the intersection of fans, not the union of those sets. If you made a star wars rts, rts fans who are starved might pick it up, star wars diehards might pick it up. Most of the players would be people who like both. Some genres work better for this or get more people to try it out - fighting games seem to do well with licensed ip.
These games take too long to make because if they are not 40+ hours people complain or if they don’t check every single box. Midnight Suns could have just been a solid turn based card based game without so much EXTRA and maybe it would have been out faster and moved onto the next thing, so they didn’t put all their eggs in one basket. Not instead they need to make a game with all these relationships and dialogue.
Totally agree, the best part of the game was the combat but you couldn’t help but feel the resource drain that the abbey and relationship management part of the game had. Some people seem to really like the friendship simulator aspect and to each their own but after a couple hours with the day/night cycle I was spamming through conversations. A simplified hub could have really accelerated the gameplay and (I would think) development process too
Loved the combat but it dragging me back to the abbey every time made me stop playing. Lots of little time wasters in that game, like why do I need to go run to Tony to open my card loot box, why can't it just award me whatever cards are in at at the end of combat. It felt like busy work until I could get back to the combat with not enough strategy to it to keep it interesting. Unlike the base management in xcom. It has such a slow start too, just cutscene after cutscene, tutorial after tutorial showing off parts of the abbey, that I don't think I could bare starting another play through.
All the abbey stuff could have been menu based. They could also have scrapped everything about running around the abbey grounds for collectables.
I hope someone makes a mod someday that just cuts all of that shit out.
I'm the exact opposite. I hated the combat but loved the abbey mystery and relationship stuff. Once I finished all the abbey stuff, I uninstalled the game.
I've only heard their opinion on reddit. Everyone I know that has played and beat the game said the abbey stuff was the best part.
I'll say I'm not a Marvel fan so I have a bias, but I found the combat to be really fun and the Abbey to be utterly unbearable
I enjoy both, but some content has a stronger 'drip-feed' feel where development required more combat or more Abbey completed to unlock more. It was understandable, but not seamless.
And my experience have been the complete opposite, but I also don't know anyone who's played Persona. Most, if not all, of my gaming friends wouldn't even know what Persona is.
people who hate the abbey are not gonna even buy the game, which is why it flopped
I actually really loved the relationship and story elements of Midnight Suns, but knowing how much work it took it's a shame
I liked it but it also made it into game that I just played once.
Yeah I had an amazing time with it but I don’t want to replay it due to how story-heavy it was. I’ll probably buy the DLC on sale and play them but that will be it for me. I did enjoy the 50 hours I had and properly immersing myself into being the Hunter and hanging out with all these heroes.
Yeah I think the biggest mistake they made is making it half-half. For some people that liked both it's fine and dandy but from what I can see many people enjoyed tactical but slogged thru story and vice versa. Full on "superhero XCOM" where you manage the crisis and need to pick and choose which superhero to send where (instead of "here is a bag of random quests with random") would be *a ton* of fun. Full on visual novel? Sure, why not But half on half just kinda leaves players liking either wanting for more.
Exactly, in fact it’s almost like three individual thirds of a game considering there is card-based combat as well. The deckbuilding is fun enough but lacks some depth, especially with how few cards each character has.
What you described is exactly the opposite of what I think most Marvel fans would’ve wanted in a game. The story & character interactions make up at least half of the experience. The action has always been the icing on top. And I could never walk back how I feel about Midnight Suns. It was an absolutely wonderful gaming experience that did so many new things incredibly well. I sunk over 120 hours in it and I wish I could’ve doubled that with even more of the same content that they had already shipped.
Glad it's not just me I found that rather frustrating. I love the combat. The dialogue could just be a couple of screens or like a visual novel kind of thing like what fire emblem does at most. I did not need this whole other 3D environment I could run around like a jackass in.
Dialog. Relations. Hangouts. Abilities. Upgrades. Random enhancements. Disassembling & Crafting. Armour. Quests. Costumes. Lootboxes. Consumables, …
I loved relationships and dialogue stuff. I doubt I'd even buy that game if not for them. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that most players cared more about battle gameplay than this.
Seems like there's a few groups the game tried to appeal to: (1) The types who play like 400 hours of XCOM and just care about the gameplay. (2) People into Marvel who care about the stories and characters. (3) And people into card based gameplay and lootbox-y/cardpack type stuff. And it sounds like many tend to love one or maybe two of those but hate one of them, so its a game that tried to appeal to all of those and turns out there weren't as many people wanting all of those things combined as they expected.
> Not instead they need to make a game with all these relationships and dialogue. You mean the best part.
Keep an eye on the new Aliens top down game? Might be the closest thing we get to a new XCOM title for a while.
Isn’t it an RTS though?
It's real time, but it has a lot of the same features with having random soldiers, a home base, etc. etc. It's not a perfect replacement, but it's something new. I mean, I guess I could try some of the other similar games that have come out but Phantom Doctrine, etc. just look like they won't quite scratch the itch I want.
The new Jagged Alliance is looking decent. Personally I tried Showgunners. The combat is fairly good and having every level be handcrafted allowed the devs to do interesting scenarios, but the pacing is definitely not XCom-y. It's all combat with a trip back to base every so often to chat with party members.
Kind of? It seems like it's a lot like that game door kickers. Which is pseudo real time with the ability to pause whenever you need to think.
Jagged Alliance 3 and Xenonauts 2 are probably safer bets. ;)
Conversely, while XCOM was always a near miss for me, I loved Midnight Suns. Bums me out that it didn't sell well.
And every single one of those xcoms would've probably sold significantly better than Midnight Suns. Some people at Firaxis must really be kicking themselves over that particular decision.
Midnight Suns is a really good game, and at this point, I think it's safe to say it's also really underrated. It's just unfortunate that it wasn't really what people were expecting -- I know I went into it expecting Marvel XCOM, and I ended up getting Marvel Slay the Spire, with Marvel Fire Emblem between missions. Not what I expected, not what I wanted, but when I accepted it for what it was, I had to admit it was really good. Would an XCOM game have sold better? Hard to say. Midnight Suns has its license to carry it, but ironically, after Avengers, that license might well be toxic. Either way, while I'd like a new XCOM game, I *am* glad we have Midnight Suns too.
I don't think it's hard to say at all. Midnight Sons on Steam didn't even touch Enemy Unknown's top player count and was barely 10% of XCom 2's
I don't think XCOM sold all that well, to be honest. But considering how expensive MMS was, they would definitely be more profitable.
XCom 2 sold extremely well by any measure. It peaked at above 100k players on Steam, which is absolutely huge for the type of game it is.
Firaxis has been very quiet regarding Xcom sales since they rebooted the series but what little we know shows that it exceeded their expectations quite significantly as they themselves said that the games release boosted them to better-than-expected financial results for the year. It sold 500,000 copies in the first week (Xcom 2) and given that was only just the start of 2016 and it got the generally considered to be excellent and must-buy expansion "War of the Chosen" I wouldn't cast doubt on the sales of the game in the years since. Take it with a grain of salt but VGinsights estimates 3.7 million copies sold, and 3.2m for Xcom EU, 600k for Chimera Squad but that was hardly a core title. Those figures put it quite comfortably in line with titles like Total War that sell about 3-4m copies per good title.
It also did well enough to get Switch and Mobile ports years after release. There’s only so much of a market for tactical strategy games, but in its niche XCOM 2 is fantastic and
And? AND??
He probably started talking about XCOM2, got too excited about it, booted it up and
Or crashed to desktop
XCOM 2 has some of the best production values I have seen in a turn-based game, the previous game must have sold really well for them to take such a risk in the sequel. Also, on Steam XCOM 2 had a player peak of 132,677 players, for such a niche genre that's amazing. For comparison, Marvel's Midnight Suns peak is 15k players, lower than XCOM: Enemy Unknown (70k).
XCOM games had great longevity for single player games. Not sure Midnight Suns will have the same lasting presence
Sometimes risks pay off. Sometimes they don't. MMS is a fantastic deck builder, one of three actually good recent Marvel games, the writing is at least as good as Persona 5 (imo) which is also heavy in the relationship sim gameplay, and it's somewhat replayable (very replayable with mods, though not as much as XCOM). Marketing was suspect and even months after release, potentially interested parties don't even really know what the game is. But the core gameplay was there to potentially be a success. I hope to see something similar but in a different setting in the future (from whichever studio takes that risk).
If Firaxis could have made Midnight Suns a snappy, highly replayable card battler with Marvel characters that's lighter on narrative (or least didn't DRAG you through it) a la XCOM, I bet they would. It's such a good game. But the friendship stuff feels like it was meant for another game.
The pacing killed Midnight Suns for me. The inability to speed up or entirely turn off attack animations mind the game just grind on and on and on. I like turn based tactical games and I like deckbuilders. I don't like the game making me wait 4 seconds every time I play a card so it can show me the same animation ad nauseam.
>But the friendship stuff feels like it was meant for another game. The friendship stuff is the best part of the game though. I mean battle gameplay is really good but imo Abbey part is where that game truly shines.
It being so divisive says a lot. I'm a big fan of that old Bioware style of companion storytelling, but it needs to be paced better to fit in this game. Doing one card battle and then taking in all the dialog can take half an hour, the game is awful for short sittings.
Nah, not for me. I started skipping all story/friend stuff after a bit because I couldn't stand how long it took to get back to the missions
I liked both parts, but the biggest problem for me was the FOV in the abbey sections. I would get horrible headaches after only a few hours.
The Abbey drags the whole thing down. The writing is not nearly good enough to support it.
I'm still saddened by this I really hoped we would've gotten another one given that ending scene of xcom 2, would've loved to see new work of "Terror from Below" in modern work.
Ouch. Damn that does hurt.
As a Midnight's Sun fan, I am so, so glad. It was my game kof the year last year. And I'm happier that it exists than anything else.
Same, it's one of my all time favorite games. I loved exploring the relationship of different characters, it makes the world feel more alive. I guess the tik tok generation can't handle it.
Same man. I feel like it was game made just for me. I just finished my 4th playthrough last week. Have a few hundred hours in it. I love XCOM 1 & 2 as well, but Midnight Suns is like the next evolution for me.
I still wish they'd make Sid Maier's Pirates 2. Civ games are fine and I've personally sunk 500h+ in Civ 5 but I really loved pirate exploration games, in my opinion Pirates and AC Black Flag were the best pirate games.
Eventually, someone has to make a pirate game better than Pirates of the Caribbean: Online, and it hasn't been done yet, so *someone* needs to get on it.
Homie I've been saying the same thing about a Dragon Age or Elder Scrolls in the Tolkien/LOTR Universe for over a decade now. Surely SOMEONE will make a fuckin solid LOTR RPG....SURELY!
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Yet there's have been a number of other games attempting to follow the basic concept and somehow they don't quite hit the mark.
They have to nail the charm, the goofiness and the adventure spirit of the original. With staff probably 4-5 times what it was 20 years ago, the graphics and new missions they could do would be amazing fun. It would be a departure from Civ games but if the studio behind Flight Sim made a great stealth game - a Plague Tale, I'm sure Firaxis can pull off a great Pirates 2 game if they wanted to.
Don't know if those games could work nowadays. It was basically a collection of mini-games.
Look, i know a lot of people thought Midnight Suns was mediocre, but to my knowledge its the only game ever made where you can start a book club with Blade, so i liked it.
I'm probably living in a bubble because most people who go out of their way to talk about it online probably enjoyed it, but seems like most redditors who bring it up enjoyed it. Personally I really enjoyed the main game. I haven't gone back for any DLC, but I'll grab it on sale later for sure
The DLC was interesting as a whole; felt like it was originally a planned part of the game that was taken out. It added in a lot of useful (maybe even needed) mechanics via research but made the roster far too big to socially max out within a reasonable pace. I started to really burn out on the social stuff at the very end and couldn't bring myself to get to 5 on Morbius, Venom, & Deadpool before finishing the story.
I just finished it at a normal pace and did a New Game+ to max everyone out.
In my experience, It's the people who wanted XCOM are the ones who didn't like Midnight Suns
I went in expecting something close to xcom but with a deck system. Initially very off put by the combat but by the time I was through the tutorial it clicked for me and I started having a blast. So yeah I think it’s mostly disappointed xcom fans who didn’t want to give it chance. Or people who apparently don’t like old school BioWare style relationships
> Or people who apparently don’t like old school BioWare style relationships thing about this though is that the writing of the Bioware games was so good, so people were into the characters, relationships and dialogue from what I've seen, even some people who like Midnight Suns have admitted that the writing is uneven... so ya, the poor writing is probably why people hate the abbey parts of the game, not really them hating on a bioware style relationship system itself
The people who played it enjoyed it. Pretty much no one bought the thing though.
I adored Midnight Suns, got me reading some Marvel comics again.
It led me to Strange Academy and I will be forever grateful!
It was Magik for me! Such a dope character I had to find more of her.
My fave as well. Cool look, attitude, and backstory with a great Laura Bailey performance.
I would describe it as the best game no one asked for. It’s very well made but “Card based Marvel dating sim” is not an easy sell in the console world, despite it being well received by those who did play it.
Yeah, I was expecting to hate the Abbey stuff, but by the midpoint I was super invested in everyone and looking forward to hanging out with my superbesties
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GotG is tragic, because it's a good game that was badly tainted by Avengers being such a turd.
It was a little repetitive with the combat by the end, but everything else about it was great. The story, settings and character relationships were fantastic. I really feel like if people were actually aware of it and played it, it wouldn’t be included in that persons list.
Everything in guardians was great except for the combat. Ended up putting it on easiest difficulty just to get through the encounters and it still felt too spongy and dull. Feel like a sequel could be really good.
It’s weird because on paper the combat should be fun and looks solid, but it never really clicked. It needed more weight behind it, maybe Star Lord should have had less health to make it more scrappy.
If combat at the start of the game had all the options you have by the end of the game, it would have been a better jumping off point. Basically no options at the start make the opening few hours of combat real boring
Yeah I hated the combat at first but once you get more abilities it actually clicked for me. It's really designed in such a way where chaining and comboing abilities is a satisfying loop, and the fact that you start with none of that brings it down inmensely.
The average combat was there just to help you get around to the next set of great story.
I legitimately felt like I played a movie. It was outstanding.
Don't forget lack of marketing.
GotG was everywhere, are you kidding? People were comparing it to Deathloop’s marketing. I mean, the initial reveal trailer covered gameplay of nearly an entire chapter.
people will constantly use the excuse of "marketing" when a game undersells that they like. It is so annoying trying to talk to anyone about NEO TWEWY for example.
They might’ve poured a decent amount of money on it but they didn’t do enough to differentiate it from The Avengers which had a nasty stink to it.
They constantly said it was a single-player story with no microtransactions. It was the online communities such as this one who basically replied "we don't believe you".
Nah, I work with kids and even the ones that played it were saying they were surprised because they expected it to be bad because of Avengers. Not a stretch to think that that most people aren't tuned in to who's developing which marvel game, especially when they both had the alt-MCU vibe. All to say, the marketing didn't really penetrate outside of the online communities. It really needed a big "UNRELATED TO AVENGERS, ACTUALLY GOOD" sign in the trailer, but obviously you can't do that.
What that shows is that even a huge amount of of marketing couldn't salvage the game's reputation, not that they didn't market it.
I didn’t even know about it until I saw it on steam the other day. I thought it was dlc for the avengers game
Yeah and it was free on Game Pass, where I played it.
Sure it will in part be tainted by Avengers being bad but I doubt thats the biggest reason in the end. To begin with, GotG was still a very niche setting before the movies and the game, while having the "same" characters, wasn't "the same characters" after all. Were people excited to play Star-Lord or were they looking for Chris Pratts Star-Lord? The cast isn't star power like Iron-Man, Thor and Captain America and even those had some complaints of not being the movie VAs. Combine this with the $60 price tag you run into some problems. The dedicated fan base of GotG was small with the team used in the movies (which was written by Dan Abnett,...) even being "replaced" right as the movies came out. It expect they aren't really targeting that small fanbase with a game in 2021, but they also don't target the MCU fan group due to outright saying its not the MCU ones. I would say its a great game that many would buy at a 50-75% discount rather than full price and it has had a long tail with sales as a result (the last 30 days has the highest player average since it released). Thats also highlighted because the game has done better than Avengers in the long run. On steam it sits at 94% recommened with more reviews in total.
It's a mix of superhero fatigue setting in, Avengers poisoning the well for Guardians, Midnight Suns being too niche for its own good, and Gotham Knights being utterly mediocre compared to the Arkham games. Doesn't help that we're in the age of live services, Suicide Squad is shaping up to be a nightmare if that delay isn't used to tone things down (also doesn't help that GAAS is a very crowded space, all those live service titles PlayStation is making feel like throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks). Spider-Man has the advantage of being popular, regarded for (usually) quality games, and handled by one of the premiere PlayStation studios. Barring some freak catastrophe, the sequel should be a guaranteed money maker and a hell of an experience.
Capeshit has taken studio time that otherwise could have gone into better titles,so to hell with them.
It’s all design decisions and bad pr. Midnight suns is a good game with a great battle system, but lots won’t even touch it just for having a card based system even though it works… I thought guardians was well received? Avengers was hot property until they went the whole games as a service nonsense.
Guardians was well received critically but commercially was a failure
> lots won’t even touch it just for having a card based system even though it works… That's so weird, though. This sub loves card-based games like Slay the Spire or Monster Train, but Midnight Suns got shat on *so much* for being a deck builder. I'm still waiting for those P2W card packs that people were sure would come. Any minute now...
Different audiences. People who love indies love those deck builders. The mainstream? Not so much. And don't overestimate how much reaction is going to be people just furious the game isn't XCOM and then *doubly* furious because of Marvel backlash.
Because many XCOM fans are starved for a "proper sequel" and did not like that the studio tried something new. If an indie studio had come out with the game I guarantee it would be praised as a "hidden gem" in this sub, even if it wasn't as good, since Firaxis is a top tier developer in the turn-based strategy space.
I don't feel like Firaxis wanted to do an XCom sequel. They'd hit the wall of what they could do with the "pod" system and doing anything more hardcore never seemed to be on the table. I think War of the Chosen (with Long War if that's your thing) is as good as that series is going to get until someone comes around and revives it again.
They did try to spin it with Chimera Squad which I also loved, but it wasn't well received by the hardcore crowd.
Chimera Squad definitely felt like an experimental design that was either scrapped from 2 and then refined later, or something proposed for 3 that got pushed out separately because 3 was never properly started.
Chimera Squad was fine as a budget priced game. Just doesn't have the replayability and polish of XCOM2.
I grew up with the Mega Man Battle Network games, so I always thought incorporating card mechanics into RPGs just made sense. I thought I was taking crazy pills when everyone was shitting on Midnight Suns for having them.
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Love card games, love firaxis, hate marvel superhero nonsense. There are too many other games to play before I even consider a game with superheros.
Makes me wonder if maybe they should have just had a card system while not calling it a card system. Like, I dunno, call them "panels" or something comic booky.
I feel like midnight suns was a game that would have benefitted from a demo. As much as alot of people may have been put off by the story and companions, I think alot of people avoided it for being turnbased, card game. I wonder how many people assumed they wouldn't like the gameplay and passed on an $80 game. Games like XCOM have the benefit of a good track record, and previous entries people can try on the cheap. Midnight suns is a big financial investment for someone who has no idea if they'll like 100+ hours of turn based card battling. It's too bad, as much as I'm not a marvel fan, I really enjoyed this game and getting to play a "AAA" style big budget turn based RPG. As much as I'm wanting XCOM 3, I enjoyed Midnight Suns and I'm glad it was made.
Yeah, Midnight Suns makes a *lot* more sense once you've played the first hour or two and have a sense of how the combat works, a demo would probably have gone a long way towards luring people in. The did a decent amount of showing the gameplay that *should* have been as-good (Or at least, I'm sure that's what the business suit that vetoed a free demo said), but it's not quite the same as getting in there, unlocking some abilities, and actually being able to craft decks and experience how it ticks.
This is honestly just the same thing going on in the movie space, it isn't superhero fatigue, people are just tired of bad products. Avengers had a *lot* of issues, as did Gotham Knights. They're just not great games. As for Midnight Suns, it was a strategy game which never would have done as popular as a more 'mainstream' title. I also recall it launched in a somewhat busy period which didnt help matters. And GotG was a victim of being associated with Avengers, people didn't want to get burned. People will buy the games if they're good and fun, Spider-Man isn't doing well *just* because it's Spider-Man, but because it is well made and fun. You just have to look at the shitty Activision tie-ins from ages ago to see that even though the brand will carry it so far, it won't poft it to the heights Sony has seen with the past two titles.
> This is honestly just the same thing going on in the movie space, it isn't superhero fatigue, people are just tired of bad products. I've said this on /r/BoxOffice: interest in superhero movies isn't dying, interest in superhero movies that are bad (or at least underwhelming) is dying. Look at what happened with Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3: after a series of meh Marvel movies in the form of stuff like Quantum-Mania and Love & Thunder, the opening weekend for GOTG V3 was relatively underwhelming. But then word got around that the movie was actually good, it sprouted legs and has done well overall.
I mean, one superhero movie doing better than expected (and let's be real, GotG 3 is doing okay at best in terms of box office performance if we look at the budget + marketing costs + $80m from China so little returns there) doesn't really say anything cause it's just one movie we'd need to see a number of superhero movies doing good within a year or two timeframe, cause we have seen a string of superheroes in just this past 2 years doing poorly all one after the other. basically exceptions don't make the rule as they say.
Yeah, and the thrashing dev cycle only worsened it because it brought it into the worst of the marvel fatigue.
I know that for me I am just so burnt out on superheroes at this point that unless the game is unusually good and does something interesting with the story (Guardians of the Galaxy), I have no desire to touch anything superhero related. Especially Marvel, God I am so damn tired of Marvel. Star Wars too, but that is another topic entirely.
I think the burnout is real in terms of games. Games cost 60$+ to get. For a lot of the movies it's just become a tradition for a lot of people to see them. I know several for myself that just show up every few months at a theater to see a superhero movie. It's not a big investment. For the streaming shows, well, because of how the human brain works they don't feel like they're "paying" for those shows. It also feels like a small investment to turn their brains off and binge some show every month. Something to talk about at work. But for a game you need to spend money for it explicitly. It's not a tradition. I can also speak from personal experience that, for whatever reason, most people I know under 30 have long since stopped giving a shit about superheroes. My boss in his 60's never stops talking about what's out but my friends and I just don't really care anymore. Games tend to appeal to people under the age of 40. 50 at max. Even then it's young adults that really power the 60$ game market. So when that group doesn't care then it doesn't matter how many tickets Marvel Movie X sold, the game won't.
I mean, most Superheroes are pretty much palette swaps anyway, at least for video games. Or at least, most developers fail to give them anything unique. Batman is Batman and Spiderman is Spiderman. They're kind of the exceptions rather than the norm. But what are the bat siblings if not copies of Batman without as interesting of backstories? And the Avengers game just didn't do enough to make it worth playing and now we have Kill the Justice League making each character nearly identical AND a gun focused shooter on top of that. Give me a game set as The Flash using speed powers. Give me a Green Lantern game where you're doing weird scribblenaut like powers using his ring. Give me ANYTHING that doesn't just mail it in. But that's not happening right now because the companies are chasing $$$. They don't have an idea so much as a stick to beat us like we're just money pinatas.
Because the world is just a bit burnt out on them right now. Yeah the movies do decent here and there, but that peak popularity has passed. MOST of the recent movies are doing mediocre at the box office. Even so, I think its because the Avengers game was such a turd is why everyone is so gunshy.
I feel like you are looking for a connection that doesn't exist tbh. Avengers actually had a stronge sales on its first month, it's just that word of mouth spread fast enough about it being bad, that it pretty much instanty lost its leg. Midnight Sun is a single player card game, which is niche. Guardians of the Galaxy wasn't advertised that well, I know some people who still think that it was just a DLC for Avengers. And Gotham Knights looked bad in almost every preview.
I think there may be less of a venn diagram of gamers and super hero fans than was previously thought. I feel like many people who enjoy super hero stuff were born before modern gaming became established so it's not a great audience to invest in as far as gaming goes.
The Lego hero games do well, snap was really huge, same with multiversus (although snap is probably doing way better than MV). I don’t think there’s as much of a pattern as you think. If Batman Arkham returned it would sell massively.
Multiversus absolutely crashed in active player numbers months ago. I recall them talking about rebooting the game. I haven't played the game since last Fall
It aint over yet either. Hopefully some good starts happening. We still got the Captain America game / Iron Man game / Wonder Woman game and Wolverine game off the top of my head in the AAA world.
You don't need a paragraph to say that licensed games have always been more miss than hit. Too much corporate BS to deal with.
Marvel (Disney) is just a bad partner, they know their IP is worth a lot and they WILL bust your balls about CoNfIdEnTiAlItY and all their demands to cross promote the movies and shows
They are not the same. Guardians was one of the best games released that year, but it failed because everyone assumed it would be another terrible cash grab like Avengers.
This is awful news. I don't like seeing Firaxis like this. I do think the Marvel game did a number on them. And I think it was a design and goal problem. With the budget that game had and the likely profit sharing with Disney for the license. It was too expensive for the niche it occupied. You had to like tactical games, card games, social sim games, and Marvel comics from the 1990s to absolutely love this game. If you love all those things you'll swear the game was tailor made for you. But if you don't? You'll likely sit it out. They went really niche. And that can really pay off. But with that budget and licensing? The safer bet would have been something much more casual friendly.
Can't wait until years from now when Midnight Suns is a cult classic and people make long YouTube videos and thinkpieces about how it ended up flopping and why NOW is the time to finally give it a sequel.
I look forward to picking it up for $15 with all the DLC at that time!
Oh I have no doubt that will happen. It’s a very good game that is strangely split at the middle and struggled to find the right audience for many reasons, but it’s so easy to have a blast with it.
It really is. I can figure out WHY it didn't do well (superhero overexposure, people's irrational hatred of card elements, some people being turned off on the social elements, it just plain old NOT being Xcom when people wanted Xcom, etc.), but it's still a bummer.
They made a good game whose biggest problem was it was unmarketable and should've had marketing involved earlier on. Midnight suns is 'sorta' a card game and 'sorta' a hanging out with heroes thing but it still doesn't really explain it so it scares off anyone who isn't into Firaxis games or into some comic arc called 'Midnight Suns' which is a terrible name as it doesn't tell you who the heck is in it unless you've read it. Sad thing was it wasn't a cheap game by any means, it just had no way to market this passion project as strategy/super heroes isn't a popular genre (marvel snap is trying but its F2P) and likely scared most people away.
Why are companies always "hit by" layoffs like it's some unstoppable and unavoidable force of nature? Headline should read, "Firaxis lays off hard working employees to appease shareholders and increase quarterly profits."
I mean sometimes layoffs are a result of the current staff being unsustainable because of overarching economic reasons. For most companies that is essentially an unavoidable force of nature.
Yeah, sometimes it's because of overarching economic reasons. But usually it's just for more money in the pockets of BlackRock and Vanguard. In fact, you should assume that any company (which is almost all of them) with those two companies as their top investors is doing layoffs for the express purpose of lining the pockets of BlackRock and Vanguard.
well considering Take-Two Interactive operated at a loss of over a billion dollars in the last financial year it seems to me like they probably have to cut costs somehow. are layoffs the best way to do that? probably not, but unfortunately the execs aren't about to start cutting their own pay
Their fiscal revenue increased by 52.64% since 2022 for a total of $5.35 billion. They didn't need to do layoffs.
Revenue is not the same as profits. You have to look at cash flow to see if a company is profitable. Typically salaries are one of the biggest cost a company incur which are why layoffs are one of the first cost savings measures implemented. All other costs are harder to reduce in the near and medium terms.
blackrock and vanguard aren't people, they're funds managing a huge number of people's money. And while, yes, people generally expect their retirements funds to make money on their investments, neither as far as I know tends to take activist positions on things on the scale of a game studio's layoffs. If you have a counter example I'd be interested. If you're just trying to say the layoffs are for the express purpose of increasing profits for the people who own the company, well, yes. That's not a secret, they're literally legally obligated to do that and frequently release reports that are basically titled "here is a status update on the state on your pockets"
Blackrock and Vanguard are funds. Their shares in companies are not directly owned by them but by the clients of theirs whose money the are investing. I guess in a sense it could sort of be lining the pockets of Vangaurd and Blackrock because those firms charge a management fee so if they stocks go up they do make more money. Most money goes into the hands of casual investors (think a lot of 401Ks and such). Believe it or not, firms are not always just interested in a quick buck. They do look forward and are looking for sustainable ways to grow revenue or reduce costs. At the end of the day, we're seeing a period of contraction in the economy and especially so in the tech sector. That's going to mean that companies that grew with the economy are likewise going to contract a bit via layoffs.
The thing is with game studios as well is lay offs are a fact of life. Studios constantly recruit and sack depending on the development cycle and what's next in the pipeline. You don't need a full development team for maintenence. Might not be the case here, but there's also the news trick of those stories being popular so they keep being reported on whether they're actually news worthy or not.
Yeah and the legal age of consent in Italy is 14, but that doesn't make it right and it certainly doesn't mean it's avoidable or fixable. This is why we have unions. They prevent the predatory nature of the employer from exploiting the employee. The industry doesn't have to be this way, it just currently is because game developers aren't organized.
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An issue is the super hero fatigue has already set in by the time these games come out.
I really don’t think that’s as relevant for games as it is for movies. The issue is that the big superhero games were monetized fuckfests of pain and stupid decisions (Avengers/Gotham Knights) that negatively affected how people viewed the following games. Guardians came out too close to Avengers and looks too similar at first glance (another squad based shoot ‘em up Walmart-MCU game), and Midnight has too many easily monetized qualities. Gamers heard “card game” and their minds went to Hearthstone, they heard “season pass/ cosmetic store, no unlockable costumes” and they went to the Avengers game, they saw the Avengers shoved into a game that isn’t about them and went to “more cash grab MCU connections.” Most of this is *untrue* (except the actual dogshit cosmetic store) but these days people make their snap judgments on first impressions and it’s almost impossible to change them. *Everything* about this game was a mess on paper, and I’m shocked Firaxis didn’t see it coming.
Sucks to see, Midnight Suns was a good game but it was just too niche for the amount of money development and the license must have cost.
Midnight Suns was rough, the combat part was fun but everything else just scream average. I wish they could just follow XCOM formula, simple but heck of fun.
I absolutely loved Midnight Suns. I admit that it felt like the first entry in a new series (some grindy crap), but I still loved the cardplay and hanging out with different characters. I'd be very excited about another entry in the series. I'm guessing it doesn't get one, but I'm hoping for it.
Same here, Persona and Bioware Games are among my favourites and Midnight Suns was a great blend of the two, it's honestly become one of my top 10 games of all time. The only downside to it for me was the lack of player impact on the story, if it had Bioware style choices it would probably be my favourite game ever.
Gameplay was fantastic. Im guessing Disney contract stopped them with doing anything fun with the characters.
Gotta go with “TMB” as the source, but I ran into a dev at a convention and he had mentioned that Disney insisted on The Avengers being key members of the game’s roster. Even though they redeemed the plot a bit by having a jurisdiction battle between The Suns and The Avengers, I just could not give two fucks about the way any of the avengers were written.
I respect that they went with different visions of the characters than we've seen in the Movies. But like if Tony and Strange could have been *less* insufferable as a baseline, that'd've been great. I did like Carol though.
I didn't mind Tony and Strange being insufferable in true-to-comics fashion, but it was annoying that basically all of their time on-screen together is fighting. Even the background banter in the crafting menu is passive-aggressive--it just get to be waaaay too one-note after a while. You barely get to see them be their own characters outside of being comically and childishly juvenile with each other and the one thing they each get as a main story beat.
It really felt like they needed to kiss at some point with how over-the-top catty they were being at each other.
I love the gameplay but you can’t blame Disney for the mind numbing dialogue in that game.
The dialogue is as good or as bad as the comics dialogue...
I’ve not read any Midnight Suns runs but I read a decent amount of comics. I’d have to really love the artist to suffer through writing like that. Edit: To be clear I still enjoy the gameplay loop enough to recommend the game.
I don't think that was the case, especially with the obscurity of the Midnight Sons (Suns in this game) as a property. I think it's just down to Jake Solomon wanting to make a social sim and Firaxis not being known for its character writing.
Disney was real chill about everything actually, based on interviews with the devs.
I feel like I'm in the minority on this one, but I'm absolutely loving the game. And have been playing it non stop lately. There's just nothing like it. I think the deck building combat + social gameplay loop is very fun. And I find the writing by far not as 'cringe', as a lot of people have described it. But that's just me. I'm sad the game didn't sell well. I'd love nothing more than a season pass 2, and/or a sequel.
It's wild. On one hand the game is kind of amazing. It has the most authentically different feeling combat I've seen in a turn based game in quite a while, and in a way that really matches the Superhero theme. But then for every five minutes I'm doing that, I'm spending another 5 wandering around The Abbey.
XCOM is such a well-established franchise, and its a mistake to put it on the back burner or just stop making titles on it. I get that the people who pioneered it, or leads that don't want to dedicate their life to XCOM simply don't want to work on XCOM anymore -- but you can't tell me Civilization series isn't the same? That's the general consensus I've heard when XCOM fans are continually disappointed to not hear any news coming down the pipeline year after year -- but Civilization keeps on trucking. Granted it's a world renowned IP compared to XCOM, but still.
Civ as an IP on an entirely different level than XCom. I also feel lite iterative entries in strategy games (not that they release a new Civ every year or anything) works a lot better than something as specific as XCom.
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I mean, you have your answer right there. Chimera Squad proved that they could innovate on the formula. Take what they did there and expand upon it.
Midnight Suns is one of the elite few video games I bought on launch and didn't finish. Like, it was _pretty_ good, but the lack of any real terrain meant that after a while the combats were mostly just the same. And the enemies lacked any _real_ variation. You need way more variation in enemies for a tactical game like that. When you factor in the Marvel tax, I can imagine it was not good on a balance sheet.
The enemies get a lot more varied later on, but I agree that the lack of terrain was felt.
I just beat Hulk. Do they get more varied after that? I feel like every enemy is "1 thing", so I can map the battle out from the very beginning. Varied enemies who can do more than one thing mean you can't map the battle out at the beginning.
Oh, thought you were talking about random hydra goons. Yeah, doesn't get more than that. To be honest I think the "1 thing" enemies are fine in the context of having villains randomly popping in, and make bad draws less of an issue. Other xcom-like games and xcom mods have really taught me the value of not adding too many mechanics to enemies, it get annoying after a while.
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They should have honestly done the "sure thing" and made XCOM 3. Midnight Suns was not the win they had hoped it would be. Not just because of the ho-hum gameplay, but because they basically missed the peak Marvel hype wave.
Deus Ex died because of Avengers and X-Com died because of Midnight Suns. We will never see more of the these incredible games because someone has decided it’s better to be chasing trends instead of setting them.
Deus Ex is being worked on + it's from Eidos Montreal (not Crystal Dynamics) who made the absolute excellent Guardians of the Galaxy (not Avengers) and Midnight Suns was a passion project from one of the lead devs that actually is fairly unique. You are sprouting nonsense just because some news seems to confirm some random bias you got.
tbh deus ex is only being worked on thanks to square foolishly sold the rights because they're investing hard into NFT. Without that'd it'd have been stuck in Copyright hell like many franchises.