Marvel's Midnight Suns Difficulty Options Explained

The highly anticipated new superhero game "Marvel's Midnight Suns" has had a turbulent development cycle. This turn-based tactical RPG from "XCOM" developer Firaxis Games will let players interact with the world of comics characters — including mutants, Avengers and radioactive spider-guys — through a more strategic gameplay style. Some fans have been worried that the card-based combat might not be the best fit for Marvel's action packed multiverse, but with the announcement of a new release date of December 2, gamers are beginning to feel the hype for the next big superhero game. 

As "Marvel's Midnight Sun" quickly approaches, fans are also starting to look toward what kind of features and tactical challenges it will offer. It seems that Firaxis wants there to be a wide spectrum of difficulty to the game, so the developer has given "Midnight Suns" some pretty diverse settings in order to suit players' needs and make the challenge level as customizable as possible. Here's how they work.

It appears that "Marvel's Midnight Suns" won't simply have an easy, normal and hard mode like most games. Instead, there will be a copious number of difficulty settings that can add varying degrees of challenge or allow gamers to take their time in making more tactical decisions.

Firaxis' creative director Jake Solomon spoke with Game Rant recently and gave some insight into the new system. "We have Story difficulty, Normal difficulty, and then three Heroic levels," he said. "When you get into Ultimate difficulty, if you're going to start beating missions, you have to slow down. You have to really look at things and go, 'Okay, I have got to play these abilities in exactly the right order to win.' At Ultimate 2 or Ultimate 3, even that may not be enough every time." Story, Normal, three Heroic settings, and three Ultimate settings makes for a grand total of eight difficulty options/tiers.

Solomon also mentioned that each decision matters more and more as players go up in difficulty, until they reach a point where even playing perfectly may sometimes result in failure. Solomon suggested that Story and Normal difficulty are recommended for most gamers' first playthroughs which will allow them to take in the narrative and learn the game's mechanics. The more challenging difficulties exist to add dimension to the game's replayability.