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Marvel’s Midnight Suns, the upcoming tactical role-playing game from XCOM developer Firaxis Games, will allow players the jump into mystical combat alongside a dozen characters from the Marvel Comics universe. However, rumors circulated that the Firaxis Marvel project wouldn’t include established Marvel characters before the game’s official reveal. The reports conjured up ideas that players would control generic SHIELD or SWORD operatives, fitting into the idea that this would be XCOM in the Marvel Universe. It turns out that’s not the case. Midnight Suns director Jake Solomon tells ComicBook.com that he loves the Marvel universe too much to pass on an opportunity to develop a game around its character.
“Somebody sent that [rumor] to me. Those people have never met me I guess,” Solomon says, expressing his love for the established Marvel characters. As to whether there was ever a version of Midnight Suns that might resemble what those rumors described, Solomon says, “No way. If I’m working with Marvel, the idea of not using the Marvel heroes would make no sense to me.”
What Midnight Suns does have is an original, customizable character called the Hunter. This character serves as the player’s avatar, allowing them to stand side-by-side with X-Men, Avengers, and Runaways members.
“The Hunter is there to allow the player to put themselves into this awesome Marvel story,” Solomon explains. “That was all from the beginning, the idea of we’d love for the player to be able to put themselves into this game. But that’s a very long process. You don’t just say, ‘We’re going to create a new Marvel superhero.’ It’s a very long, involved process, as it should be. So we worked with Marvel for a long time on who The Hunter was and what role they filled.
Marvel Games’ Bill Rosemann adds, “When they first brought it up, the question was, ‘Could we create a new character for the player to customize and fully be? And we said, ‘Yeah, we do have that freedom in our games.’ We can look at older characters, we can reinterpret characters, and we can even create new characters. But if we’re going to do that, we need to take it very seriously… Think of the character holistically. And when you do that and spend all that time and sweat developing the character, then you end up with something like the Hunter, and you can have them stand right between Captain America and Captain Marvel and they look like they belong. Because we really thought about them in a true Marvel way, in making them as deep and complex and a real person as possible.”
What do you think of Midnight Suns‘ lineup of Marvel Comics characters? Let us know in the comments, and check out the rest of our Midnight Suns coverage right here. Marvel’s Midnight Suns will debut in March 2022 on PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.