Despite having just been announced less than three months ago, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, a tactics role-playing game in the vein of XCOM, has been delayed, developer Firaxis Games announced today. It will now come out in the back half of 2022, pushed out of a previously vague March 2022 window.
“We decided to push our launch because we need more time to make this the best game possible,” creative director Jake Solomon and senior franchise producer Garth DeAngelis wrote in a joint statement on Twitter. “These extra months will be used to add more story, cinematics, and overall polish and will be essential in helping us make our vision a reality.”
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Like the studio’s previous games, Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a tactics game that sees you move characters around confined battlefields in turn-based combat. You create your own customized superhero, who squads up with other Marvel mainstays, including Dr. Strange, Iron Man, and Wolverine—who, by the way, is getting his own big-budget treatment from Insomniac. (Let’s hear it for Marvel’s ceaseless expansion into video games.)
Despite the XCOM pedigree, early footage of Marvel’s Midnight Suns has shown a tactics game that’s a touch more forgiving. For one, there’s no permadeath. Oddly, it’ll feature a card system, which seems to be all the rage these days (cough, cough Back 4 Blood). You also obviously have straight-up superpowers, reminiscent of the abilities featured in last year’s lukewarmly-received XCOM: Chimera Squad. As Solomon told Polygon, these design choices are meant to stoke a feeling that you really are a freakin’ superhero, spandex and all.
As IGN’s Reb Valentine notes, Marvel’s Midnight Suns has been pushed out of publisher Take-Two’s current fiscal year and into the next.
“We couldn’t be more excited about [Marvel’s Midnight Suns]. We don’t love when we have to slip a title. It’s not that common for us; it’s been very uncommon in past years,” Strauss Zelnick, head of Take-Two, whose 2018 game Red Dead Redemption 2 was delayed multiple times, told IGN. “This is a situation where we thought it made sense, and therefore we stand behind it.”