Marvel’s Midnight Suns might not have impressed everyone, and the initial premise of its deck-building systems seemed to be a part of that. However, engaging fully in its RPG and strategic turn-based gameplay is enriching long after the story’s credits roll. Half of why can be credited to how fluid the gameplay loop is in its day and night cycle, while the other half must account for Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ wonderful roster of personable characters all living under the same roof at the Abbey.
The Abbey is eventually brimming with iconic characters spanning different corners of the Marvel pantheon. The base game of Marvel’s Midnight Suns alone boasts 13 playable characters before four more were added throughout the Season Pass, and that makes for a living space that always feels a bit congested even if it’s great to have icons like Tony Stark or Wade Wilson to run into. Now, depending on where Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2 takes place, it could make sense to evict a handful of characters to enrich the dynamic between who’s left.
Why Less is More for Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2
Starting Small Can Be Beneficial
If Marvel’s Midnight Suns does receive a sequel, cutting the original’s base game roster in half may be a divisive yet advantageous choice. Only packing the main narrative with six or seven characters would be a bit of a tough pill to swallow at first and could risk making the game seem empty by comparison, but it could also make relationships with these characters far more in-depth and rewarding.
There’s no reason Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2 would need to be as long as Marvel’s Midnight Suns is, either, because the sequel could take the opposite approach and stretch out its playtime duration with a longer series of episodic DLC. Doctor Doom would be an epic main antagonist for Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2, and depending on who could be carefully curated for its tighter roster, it might be completely valid with only six or seven characters before post-launch DLC introduces a handful more.
Keeping the base roster light would allow whichever characters the studio cherry-picks to be fully developed on their own. Likewise, this would incentivize deeper relationship mechanics between each of them, whether or not that means a shorter story campaign is necessary as a result of fewer characters readily playable in ordinary progression.
Allotting More Time for Post-Launch DLC in Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2
Enhancing Post-Launch DLC for Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2
The beauty of Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ post-launch Season Pass DLC is that all four characters can now be part of the base game’s story and join the Hunter in the main narrative. It could be highly detrimental for Marvel’s Midnight Suns 2 to add most of its roster via post-launch updates, then, unless they somehow contribute to the base game’s story thereafter and aren’t simply flies on the wall.
That said, Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ understandably incoherent New Game Plus mode basically unlocks every playable character from the beginning. This means players get to spend as much time as possible with them even if they aren’t integral to the campaign’s events and inevitably feel out of place until the time they’re naturally supposed to be added.
The DLC for Marvel’s Midnight Suns was fulfilling with each new character adding quite a bit to the dynamic of the full roster, but the story it developed throughout all four post-launch episodes only centered around a small quest. If DLC is extended in a sequel to accommodate more characters that way, it would also warrant each installment to be longer and more rewarding in terms of what antagonists could appear, leaving the base game’s story to wrap up and leave loose ends for exhilarating DLC adventures to knot.