Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, Joe Weinhofer, game director at Firaxis, explained the evolution of tactical combat in Marvel's Midnight Suns and He explained the thinking behind the most controversial element, the use of cards to represent superhero powers.

"It's odd to have cards in a tactical superhero game. Yes, of course. We knew this would be a controversial choice and that the reputation and first impressions would be mixed." People look at this game and say, 'Oh, there's a card in it. Oh, it's got cards in it. But it fit the game and our design goals.'

In the end, we liked Midnight Suns and chose it as our runner-up for GOTY in 2022. However, when it was announced in 2021, it was not well received at first because it was a marriage between a deck builder and XCOM. Perhaps it was because strategy fans were waiting with baited breath for a full sequel to "XCOM 2," or perhaps it was the result of general card fatigue, as deckbuilders had been flooding Steam for several years since "Slay the Spire." Similar concerns may have contributed to the slow sales of "Midnight Suns," but Weinhofer's talk at GDC justified point by point every design decision the team made to arrive at the final combat system, and easily convinced us that cards were the right way to go! easily convinced me that the cards were in the right hands.

Firaxis started with the combat of "XCOM 2" as a rough base for "Midnight Suns," but quickly decided that its vast array of elements needed to be changed. To make a long story short, Marvel liked XCOM 2 and wanted to make a squad-based tactics game with Marvel's superheroes." After thinking about adapting Agents of SHIELD into a game, Firaxis decided that having characters like Spider-Man in the game every once in a while wasn't interesting enough, and that players would want to control their own heroes. And when one's squad is composed of superheroes rather than flesh-and-blood humans, most of XCOM's mechanics (permadeath, fragile soldiers, RNG accuracy) do not work.

"We needed to focus on the heroes in this game. With this goal in mind, we established a fundamental pillar: feeling like a hero. We want players to feel like superheroes at every turn, and this goal should drive all decisions about what to include in the game."

That superhero power fantasy influenced some major decisions:

"We knew this was risky - we basically removed all the mechanics that make XCOM an interesting tactical game," Weinhoffer said. Weinhoffer said. The remainder of the talk focused on how Firaxis "regains that interest while keeping the 'heroic feel' pillar."

The team's first attempt to reintroduce XCOM's exciting randomness was a counter system. This idea was tried several different ways, but never worked well and simply discouraged players from attacking the enemies they were supposed to be fighting. The element of surprise was introduced, but it was not an interesting strategy and therefore not very heroic.

"We wanted predictable results in Midnight Suns and knew that the heroes were guaranteed a chance to hit the attacker. So what if we transferred that randomness to the actions available to the heroes? We would save a lot of tutorial time because we wouldn't have to explain what the cards are, and these basic concepts could be more easily manipulated with other game rules and mechanics. Compared to the previous prototypes, the possible actions of players each turn are now less predictable, but the outcome is still predetermined and there aren't as many surprise explosions..." Turn-to-turn gameplay is also less repetitive, thanks to random card draws. 0]

Weinhofer noted that this system would not work in "XCOM," where what can be done each turn is consistent but the outcome of actions is unpredictable. In contrast, he said, "It is important for a hero to always succeed in his actions in order to feel heroic. So, instead, randomize what they can do each turn."

"Using predictable outcomes in the encapsulation of card gameplay allows us to get exactly the feeling of being heroic in combat that we wanted, while giving enough randomness per turn for strategic planning and giving every hero interesting We were able to give them a gameplay design space large enough to create abilities.

The decision to give heroes freedom of movement in combat led to Midnight Suns' knockback and environmental attacks, making positioning critical in the absence of a cover system. However, the card left another major problem to be solved. That is how to handle resource management and ability costs. Should heroes have unique abilities or draw from a general pool?" Should individual characters have their own energy reserves, or should players have one large energy pool for the entire squad to draw from?

Giving each hero a separate unique deck had too much overhead. A shared energy pool also created a "feast or famine" problem where certain heroes tended to monopolize all the action. 'When you have a hero on the board, like the Hulk, who does more damage than any other character, it was very easy for him to default to using all the actions, simply because he was more powerful. 'That's not good. We want to make our heroes feel like a team and give everyone a chance to shine in combat."

Eventually, they settled on sharing an energy pool, simplifying decision-making each turn, and the abilities available each turn are determined by the randomness of card draw. Some heroes might spend a turn with no good cards to play, but this was mitigated by options such as environmental attacks, which rarely felt useless. The energy cost presented Midnight Suns with a different problem than most deckbuilders. Keeping the number of strategic options each turn fairly small and not wanting to bloat the hero deck with a huge number of cards, the card costs and player energy pools could not be scaled up over time. Paradoxically, to avoid overcomplicating the card system, we added a secondary resource for playing cards.

"After testing the secondary resource, which we call "heroim," we really liked the flexibility it gave us. "Some cards could generate heroism while others could consume it. It allowed us to turn a great resource knob when balancing cards. Cards could regenerate, consume more heroism, or consume less heroism. In fact, we were so pleased with what heroism as a secondary resource gave us as a mechanic that we decided to look back at energy to compensate and reduce complexity. In the final game, energy is not present on any of the cards in Midnight Suns. It is invisible. Our primary resource is called "card play." This is the explicit number of cards that can be played from your hand each turn, and every card implicitly consumes one card play. That's all.

The heroism system also provides a useful way to increase the value of "skill" and "attack" cards, making players use more interesting abilities more often instead of always falling back on simple attacks.

If you have ever wondered whether randomness in Firaxis games is really random, Weinhoffer concluded his talk with one final tidbit. To prevent a player's hand from becoming full of heroism-consuming cards, they added a redraw ability and "under the hood so that if the entire hand is unplayable, the redraw is guaranteed to draw a playable card, even if it wasn't exactly at the top of the deck. Slight adjustments were made". "

"In these edge cases, we found it acceptable to subtly adjust the rules to ensure that players have a positive experience and get out of really negative and frustrating situations. 'Bend the rules to avoid the worst outcomes or edge cases. If you are debating whether to break a rule or leave a really frustrating situation in the game or let the players ragequit, break the rule. There are a lot of subtle, soft nudges like this in the game to make sure players have a good time. Even in strategy and tactics games that run on a really strict rule set, the ultimate goal of everything we do is to make sure the players are having fun."