Marvel's Midnight Suns [Firaxis]

[hepcat]

Jared Leto's Bat Mite was actually really good. I thought he did a great job of portraying the tragedy of a 2 foot tall magical version of The Great Gazoo who didn't get a little flying saucer and was constantly being smacked around by Robin.

[Blackhawk]

Pfft. Low-budget Mxyzptlk with a cowl.

[Carpet_pissr]

Man Bat?! LOL, please tell me that's a joke.

Man Spider
Man Ant
etc

[Smoove_B]

Man Bat?! LOL, please tell me that's a joke.

Nope, totally real. And much scarier than Killer Moth.

[hepcat]

Man Bat resonated with me as a kid.

Probably because I was born with wings and a bat snout.

[Blackhawk]

I remember reading about that in the paper at the checkout.

[GreenGoo]

Man Bat?! LOL, please tell me that's a joke.

Nope, totally real. And much scarier than Killer Moth.

I owned a few of those back in the day.

[GreenGoo]

I can't recall a game that had more licensing agreements before. A bit nuts. And yes I understand all the companies and IP's going on here. It's still crazy.

edit: I have an older system with a gtx 980. I didn't know how heavy the i/o was going to be so I installed the game on an actual HD instead of the gaming SSD. The cut scenes were struggling and breaking, with audio and video out of sync. And holy hell, I alt-tabbed while this was going on and I think it broke the universe.

So I'll move it to the SSD and hope for improvement.

[Victoria Raverna]

Try to play in d3d11 mode instead of d3d12. Maybe that'll help since the game's d3d12 implementation was buggy. Not sure if they're still buggy.

[GreenGoo]

Thanks! I'll give it a try. I'm on windows 10.

[Carpet_pissr]

Thanks! I'll give it a try. I'm on windows 10.

Lucky bastard. I wish I could just blink and have my system revert to Windows 10.

[hepcat]

Windows 3.1 is where the cool kids play.

[msteelers]

I finished my 2nd playthrough today, this time with all of the DLC characters and with the difficulty cranked up to the highest setting.

It’s a fun game that I can see revisiting periodically, especially since I don’t think we’ll ever get a sequel. And the high difficulty level isn’t THAT bad. I was still able to beat most levels on the first try, and only had a few levels that were really tough. The last level was the hardest, mainly because the heroes that were selected for the final mission were terrible.

[El Guapo]

I finished my 2nd playthrough today, this time with all of the DLC characters and with the difficulty cranked up to the highest setting.

It’s a fun game that I can see revisiting periodically, especially since I don’t think we’ll ever get a sequel. And the high difficulty level isn’t THAT bad. I was still able to beat most levels on the first try, and only had a few levels that were really tough. The last level was the hardest, mainly because the heroes that were selected for the final mission were terrible.

The problem I had on the harder difficulties was that you don't get any rezzes, which was a major problem in the couple missions late that require you to keep a specific hero alive. Inevitably there would be a bad round where they'd wail on that hero and knock them out, and then it was mission over. So those missions I had to dial back down to normal difficulty.

[GreenGoo]

Game is working fine. I like it so far. It feels like a "curated" experience. Like the entire thing has been crafted to play out in a certain way. Hard to explain, but it's less open ended than Xcom, which itself was pretty tightly scripted.

Voice acting is top notch, dialogue is comic-book quality (good enough) and animations are serviceable. Plus, well known superheroes, which is most of the fun.

[msteelers]

I finished my 2nd playthrough today, this time with all of the DLC characters and with the difficulty cranked up to the highest setting.

It’s a fun game that I can see revisiting periodically, especially since I don’t think we’ll ever get a sequel. And the high difficulty level isn’t THAT bad. I was still able to beat most levels on the first try, and only had a few levels that were really tough. The last level was the hardest, mainly because the heroes that were selected for the final mission were terrible.

The problem I had on the harder difficulties was that you don't get any rezzes, which was a major problem in the couple missions late that require you to keep a specific hero alive. Inevitably there would be a bad round where they'd wail on that hero and knock them out, and then it was mission over. So those missions I had to dial back down to normal difficulty.

Yeah, but I only had an issue with the final mission. I had to keep Captain America alive but all the villains were targeting him. It took me 3-4 attempts just to get out of the first round.

[NickAragua]

Heh, that final mission, Magik turned out to be the second of my "four strongest". I sent her in with the Reinforcement card in her deck, the one that lets you summon an unused hero. So she summons Nico, who does a bang-up job healing everyone; then gets targeted by about half the enemies on the map. I figure ok, no problem, she's not one of the objectives anyway and will just teleport out, right?

Wrong, "mission failed".

And worse, the only non-autosave I had was from before the start of the "four strongest" series.

Anyway, yeah, I'm not good enough at the game that I don't need a recovery.

Although I did manage to get through a mission with Dr. Strange after everyone else got knocked out. The trick being that I had the "Vapors of ..." something. Don't remember the name. But it gives you a "conceal". With a full hand of cards, I could play my 3-4 a turn and that card is guaranteed to re-appear next turn or on a redraw, so I was able to very slowly chip away at all the bad guys without them getting a shot off. Kinda cheap, but it doesn't work on missions with timers or enemies that are able to out-regenerate the Doc's minimal DPS so I don't feel too bad about it.

[Pyperkub]

Uh, DPS isn't a thing in this game

[NickAragua]

Uh, DPS isn't a thing in this game

lol true, more like DPT I guess

[El Guapo]

Heh, that final mission, Magik turned out to be the second of my "four strongest". I sent her in with the Reinforcement card in her deck, the one that lets you summon an unused hero. So she summons Nico, who does a bang-up job healing everyone; then gets targeted by about half the enemies on the map. I figure ok, no problem, she's not one of the objectives anyway and will just teleport out, right?

Wrong, "mission failed".

And worse, the only non-autosave I had was from before the start of the "four strongest" series.

Anyway, yeah, I'm not good enough at the game that I don't need a recovery.

Yeah, this is what annoyed me about a couple of the late missions. It didn't seem feasible, at least not without trying 50,000 times, to finish those missions with zero heroes getting knocked out. But on the other hand by that point "normal" and lower difficulties are trivially easy in a way that lowers the drama involved. But there was no way that I was going to 'grind' out those missions on hard difficulty, so...trivially easy it was.

[GreenGoo]

Thanks to Blackhawk, I integrated my steam wishlist with "isthereanydeal.com". And itad just emailed me to let me know that humble bundle has a bundle that contains Midnight Suns on the first tier, so you can get it from humble bundle for pretty cheap. Like 15 canuckabucks or so.

I don't think I've seen it for less than that before.

edit: Looking at humble bundle, I see midnight suns is part of the monthly subscription bundle and not a separate individual bundle. Which makes sense, since a monthly subscription is about 15 bucks if you pay by the month for Canadians.

So 1 month subscription will give you the base game an a skin for Dr. Strange.

Another head's up. It might be too late, but the playstation store had a number of deals on all the versions of this game last weekend. Not sure how long the sale was for or when it started or ended (or will end).

I bought the Legendary edition, which I believe is everything. All DLC, season pass, exclusive skins etc. It was incredibly cheap compared to the full price, but still not as cheap as I like. I think it was CDN$37 or something.

edit: Sale seems to still be on.

Playstation: Midnight Suns Legendary edition

[GreenGoo]

Interestingly, despite playing Spiderman 1 and Miles Morales on the PS5 without issue (i.e. crazy, erratic, constant, fast movement), MMS is giving me mild, slowly building motion sickness when I run around the Abbey.

I don't know why and there aren't many settings to adjust. Frustrating.

I'm open to ideas.

[Max Peck]

This Steam thread has some tips that worked for at least one player.

The following combo worked:

• turn off motion blur
• turn off depth of field
• lower look sensitivity to 7 or 8

[Smoove_B]

Can confirm. There's a series of settings I always turn off thanks to a discussion I had years ago with Blackhawk about motion sickness. I was always messing with Field of View, but when I was still feeling nauseous in some 3rd person games or even after adjusting FoV to max range, it was all these other things (chromatic aberrations, motion blur, screen shake) that were still making me sick. 99% of the time adjusting those fixes things for me.

[GreenGoo]

This Steam thread has some tips that worked for at least one player.

The following combo worked:

• turn off motion blur
• turn off depth of field
• lower look sensitivity to 7 or 8

I looked for depth of field but it's not available on the PS5. I have tried turning off blur completely and lowering the right stick sensitivity (camera control).

I can normally acclimatize to any games that cause issues with shorter sessions and longer breaks until it finally stops affecting me, but so far not much luck.

However, it's very mild, and slow to build, so I can get an hour in here and there without being debilitated.

edit: I did reduce screen shake but I will probably turn it off. That said, I don't think it shakes much during down time at the Abbey, which is the real problem area.

Thanks for the suggestions, guys.

edit: Lastly, it has crashed on me several times. A bit frustrating for a PS5 game.

[Madmarcus]

This is the most frustrating game I've ever liked. The combat is fun, the story part is cheesy but also fun, and I don't even mind the running around the abbey doing repetitive tasks. The problem is that everything is so slow; the animations are slow, the characters talk slowly, the loading screens are slow, and the cut scenes are slow. I want a playback speed setting so I can do 1.5x or maybe even 2x.

It doesn't help that the game is turning out to be much longer than I thought. 50 hours and I just reached the beginning of Act II. I'm enjoying it but combined with the speed issue I feel like I play for hours and make very little progress.