The lead game designer at Firaxis, Joe Weinhoffer, has shared what games inspired the team while designing Marvel's Midnight Suns.
AusGamers posted an interview with Joe Weinhoffer about the upcoming strategy game Marvel's Midnight Suns on Nov. 15, 2022. One of the biggest questions centered on Firaxis' inspiration for the game's mechanics, especially with how different they are from the company's two major franchises: XCOM and Civilization. Weinhoffer answered that the team looked to several other titles like the competitive card game Hearthstone, the grid-based RPG Fire Emblem and the deck-building rogue-lite Slay the Spire. "There's a lot of different genres and elements that we've pulled in and fused together and combined." he added. "And I do think the result is really unique and something special and not something that I can immediately think of another comparison to."
Games That Inspired Marvel's Midnight Suns
Slay the Spire is an indie game released in late 2017 and quickly became emblematic of the deck-building rogue-lite subgenre. The gameplay focuses on turn-based card combat as well as deck-building management as the player makes decisions based on available cards and items.While Hearthstone is a tabletop card game similar to Magic: The Gathering, it is focused on utilizing a digital design space. Midnight Suns pulls inspiration from these two titles with its card-based action and deck-building.
Fire Emblem was another game Firaxis looked to when developing Midnight Sun's mechanics. The JRPG shares several similarities with the XCOM series, namely its grid-based movement and turn-based combat focused on abilities that interact with spacing and the environment. When Firaxis first began workshopping ideas for Midnight Suns, their original goal was to make a superhero XCOM, but the team quickly ran into a few big problems. A big part of XCOM is its setting and themes, neither of which translate well to the Marvel Universe. In XCOM, the player leads a squad of normal human fighters who have to use tactics to outwit a superior alien force. Joe Weinhoffer explained that that doesn't really work when the player is controlling superheroes like in Midnight Suns: "All the enemies are scared of them, instead of in XCOM the soldier being scared of the aliens."
Firaxis is best known for its two largest series: Civilization and XCOM, a 4X grand strategy game and a turn-based tactical game, respectively. The first few entries in both series were actually developed by the independent studio MicroProse, but the IPs moved over to Firaxis not long after its founding. The original founders of Firaxis, Sid Meier, Jeff Briggs and Brian Reynolds, were former employees of MicroProse and continued their work on the Civilization series. The company rebooted the XCOM series in 2012 to critical acclaim.
Marvel's Midnight Suns releases on Dec. 2, 2022 on PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo Switch.
Source: AusGamers