Evillevi
Shadow Pika!
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- May 16, 2014
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@Rivan9000 I blame you for this. I just restarted Marvel Midnight Sun and I'm going to post about it.
But lets start the game. and I'll explain on the way. And naturally we start with game difficulty
The difficulty scales all the way up to Ultimate 4 or but it's basically just making the enemey spongy nukes.
I'm a bit of a casual so I'm starting with story (also my mod makes the game much more difficult), but there's an important thing about difficulty you have to know . Namely that it's entirely expected that you'll increase the difficulty as it gets too easy and ramp it down if it gets too difficult. In fact I hesitate to say that there's a true difficulty because you can't really lose the campaign. Failing a mission forces you to restart or reload the encounter. So your heroes never die and can never be permanently injured.
But having chosen the easiest mode lets go with actually starting the game. That said I'll keep images in spoilers since a lot of the fun is being surprised by the writing, which for a superhero marvel product is quite good, understated and consistently has nuance
Big Talk, Big boned , he is XBONES!
So the story starts with the evil guys unearthing Lilith and being taken over. And one of the first thing you'll find is that for all it's simplicity and cheapness, the voice acting is really really good. It's consistent , in character, and just a joy to listen to.
But after this short cutscene we actually get to the tutorial , and our first 3 heroes
Now Before I start I just want to say I love the title cards introducing each hero. It's great, funny, brings a smile to my face. Unfortunately you only get to see it for a few seconds before the story and or missions resumes. And in this case the first of hours fo piecemeal tutorial.
I'm being a bit dishonest because I've already beaten the game so I just want to skip the tutorial, but it took hours to get through most of the tutorials. But lets start with how combat works and I'll spoil all the other combat tutorial here.
The core is that every round you have 3 Card Play with which you... can play 3 cards . The cards are randomly selected from all heroes in the fight, and when played the hero associated with the card takes action. And unlike Xcom each card will always work, do the same exact amount of heals /damage, and can target anyone. The only time you need to care about your position is when dealing with AOE affect or when you attempt to defenstrate someone. And my god once you get rolling, generating and spending heroism(heroism is a resource) to power your combos and pushing the limit of hte hero and you'll feel like for a moment that it's the hero right in front of you. The mod I'm using takes it up one step further by making everything tankier so it's more noticeable what happens when you perfect combo a hero. Note that a key problem is that in base MMS you'll eventually trend towards 1 turn field wipe. so some heroes are just weaker because they scale up over time and ... well you're going to win much faster than that.
But back to combat, you also have generic moves like move, redraw (1 card) and a couple of other things you'll get access to as the game goes on. But critically none of these can consistently do damage. That said you'll find that different heroes and comp uses these generics in differnet ways as well so there's a lot of depth with even such a small amount of things you can do.
Enemies OTOH can be seperated into fodder and actually dangerous. Fodder enemies are 1HP enemies that do Normal damage. Actually dangerous enemies have gimmicks , more health, and some increase in damage compared to fodder. So you need to balance lasering half the field or concentrating multiple salvo's of missile on a single target.
With that done lets talk about the writing. It's surprisingly good.
I'll post only 2 lines that you'll see right before character creation (yes you need 30-60 min from initial start game to making your characters), but I'll post my thoughts on most story beats in a seperated Spoilered post because it's good enough to deserve an oppurtunity for people to experience for themselves.
For context after the tutorial, the big bad successfully put Doctor Strange into the homeless census, cursed to hellish streets of NYC. He heads to Caretaker (the old woman) to resurrect the chosen one that killed Lilith the first time, Hunter, a blank slate hero stand in for the player. And these 2 lines represent things that are active well into their storylines and character arcs of Strange and Caretaker.
Strange has a mild character flaw in that he disregards the human element and focus on the core objective when he's locked in and under pressure. He is doing what needs to be done, and he accidentally dehumanize the people around him. That doesn't mean he doesn't care, but he knows that he is abrasive in this respect.
Caretaker OTOH has loss issue. You won't find it right now, but an hour in you figure out that she lost her lower/life companion, her sister Lilith, her nephew (us) and so on. Us getting resurrected is like opening a sore would into someone who thought that the prophecy was already fulfilled. She'll get better at handling losing everything. Practice makes perfect.
4 hours in and a lot of the writing is good. It's not revolutionary but as kinda co-workers/ teammates it drops a lot of tidbits where people have mild insecurities that feel realistic and that as you get a better friendship level you get access to more core things with the character. Most of these scenes are very lovel. And are incredibly based/flirty. For example
"I like you hunter, because you know when to say nothing"
"Really?"
"Don't do it "
"So you want me to say nothing"
"You're the worst"
"And you're the best. That's why we make a great team"
MY GOD LET THEM KISS ALREADY !!!
So lets get ready commander.
Midnight suns is a game made by Firaxis of Xcom 2 fame . You control a team of 3 superheroes, using cards /resources/combo to beat up hordes of minions, stronger minions, and irritating enemies. And best of all you get a more stable version of the Xcom2 engine with a decade + of experience of game design going into it. I've already beaten it years ago so I'm going with Dreadheart Overhaul to spice things up. I do suggest considering considering trying the game with this mod even as a first timer since it gets going a lot faster, but a lot of the careful low level balance is lost for the faster more impactful overhaul. But lets start the game. and I'll explain on the way. And naturally we start with game difficulty
The difficulty scales all the way up to Ultimate 4 or but it's basically just making the enemey spongy nukes.
I'm a bit of a casual so I'm starting with story (also my mod makes the game much more difficult), but there's an important thing about difficulty you have to know . Namely that it's entirely expected that you'll increase the difficulty as it gets too easy and ramp it down if it gets too difficult. In fact I hesitate to say that there's a true difficulty because you can't really lose the campaign. Failing a mission forces you to restart or reload the encounter. So your heroes never die and can never be permanently injured.
But having chosen the easiest mode lets go with actually starting the game. That said I'll keep images in spoilers since a lot of the fun is being surprised by the writing, which for a superhero marvel product is quite good, understated and consistently has nuance
But after this short cutscene we actually get to the tutorial , and our first 3 heroes
I'm being a bit dishonest because I've already beaten the game so I just want to skip the tutorial, but it took hours to get through most of the tutorials. But lets start with how combat works and I'll spoil all the other combat tutorial here.
The core is that every round you have 3 Card Play with which you... can play 3 cards . The cards are randomly selected from all heroes in the fight, and when played the hero associated with the card takes action. And unlike Xcom each card will always work, do the same exact amount of heals /damage, and can target anyone. The only time you need to care about your position is when dealing with AOE affect or when you attempt to defenstrate someone. And my god once you get rolling, generating and spending heroism(heroism is a resource) to power your combos and pushing the limit of hte hero and you'll feel like for a moment that it's the hero right in front of you. The mod I'm using takes it up one step further by making everything tankier so it's more noticeable what happens when you perfect combo a hero. Note that a key problem is that in base MMS you'll eventually trend towards 1 turn field wipe. so some heroes are just weaker because they scale up over time and ... well you're going to win much faster than that.
But back to combat, you also have generic moves like move, redraw (1 card) and a couple of other things you'll get access to as the game goes on. But critically none of these can consistently do damage. That said you'll find that different heroes and comp uses these generics in differnet ways as well so there's a lot of depth with even such a small amount of things you can do.
Enemies OTOH can be seperated into fodder and actually dangerous. Fodder enemies are 1HP enemies that do Normal damage. Actually dangerous enemies have gimmicks , more health, and some increase in damage compared to fodder. So you need to balance lasering half the field or concentrating multiple salvo's of missile on a single target.
With that done lets talk about the writing. It's surprisingly good.
I'll post only 2 lines that you'll see right before character creation (yes you need 30-60 min from initial start game to making your characters), but I'll post my thoughts on most story beats in a seperated Spoilered post because it's good enough to deserve an oppurtunity for people to experience for themselves.
For context after the tutorial, the big bad successfully put Doctor Strange into the homeless census, cursed to hellish streets of NYC. He heads to Caretaker (the old woman) to resurrect the chosen one that killed Lilith the first time, Hunter, a blank slate hero stand in for the player. And these 2 lines represent things that are active well into their storylines and character arcs of Strange and Caretaker.
Strange has a mild character flaw in that he disregards the human element and focus on the core objective when he's locked in and under pressure. He is doing what needs to be done, and he accidentally dehumanize the people around him. That doesn't mean he doesn't care, but he knows that he is abrasive in this respect.
Caretaker OTOH has loss issue. You won't find it right now, but an hour in you figure out that she lost her lower/life companion, her sister Lilith, her nephew (us) and so on. Us getting resurrected is like opening a sore would into someone who thought that the prophecy was already fulfilled. She'll get better at handling losing everything. Practice makes perfect.
4 hours in and a lot of the writing is good. It's not revolutionary but as kinda co-workers/ teammates it drops a lot of tidbits where people have mild insecurities that feel realistic and that as you get a better friendship level you get access to more core things with the character. Most of these scenes are very lovel. And are incredibly based/flirty. For example
"I like you hunter, because you know when to say nothing"
"Really?"
"Don't do it "
"So you want me to say nothing"
"You're the worst"
"And you're the best. That's why we make a great team"
MY GOD LET THEM KISS ALREADY !!!