I like Marvel's Midnight Suns in general. It is a great tactics game surrounded by some not so great stuff. But I wanted to play it on both my Xbox Series X and Xbox One (so I could play on my treadmill) and I bought it without realizing that in fact there is no Xbox One version. I still finished it but I'm a bit salty and...

Now I had to compress this a bit because of Giant Bomb's hosting limits, but this is pretty much how it looked on my Xbox Series X. My Hunter character doesn't look great, especially in the mouth, but she's a created character and they are always a little bit janky. I'll give them a pass there, even though that's clearly not better than XBONE graphics.

But look at Wolverine's arm. It's PS1 quality. It looks a little better from a distance but I remember when the ORIGINAL Xbox came out and they were touting that the Conker remake would have individual strands of fur. Cut to 20 years later and they're just slapping an MS Paint texture on ol' Wolverine and calling it a day. You can also see the individual polygons that make up the shape of his arm. No curves here. You can see the jagged edges on Hunter's shoulders too.

Part of this is that these were character models that were designed to be viewed further back in tactical combat mode, but this is a preset camera angle. I didn't pick it. The developers made THAT Wolverine arm and decided to have it front and center for this conversation.

Does this ruin the game? No. Does it make me salty that they couldn't get an Xbox One version out for launch? A little. I understand Firaxis i a PC first studio, and trying to get 6 SKUs (PC, 2 PlayStation and 2 Xbox plus Switch) out at one time is very difficult, but if you're going to make a game 9th gen and PC only perhaps you should either make the model a little better than that or at least use a different camera angle.

Is there a chance it isn't coming out on last gen consoles because of a CPU limitation and not a GPU limitation? Sometimes people assume that you can just lower the texture resolution and turn off some bells and whistles and get a game running on a console that's now nine years old and that's not always the case. This is why the console port of Pillars of Eternity had such absurd load times despite consisting entirely of some fairly simple 3D models, some particle effects, and pre-rendered areas to wander around in.

Or there could be other reasons. Perhaps Firaxis didn't have the time or the manpower to develop, optimize, and test last gen versions. Has this game been announced as a long-term game? As in, do they plan on supporting and releasing content for this game for the next few years? If so, they may not want to support hardware that will be over a decade old by the time the last update for this game releases.

@justin258: It's (primarily) a turn based game so it's not CPU limited. It's also announced for everything including Switch, it's just staggering the releases probably because Firaxis isn't great at optimization because they're PC focused.

But it's still funny to me that they launched a fancy new high budget licensed game 9th gen only and had THAT texture and model in there and then decided on THAT camera angle.

I think it's important to note that Firaxis has a more modest profile than many would expect given their legacy. Across six Civ games and countless side games/expansions they have sold about 40 million copies. That basically comes down to 4 million in lifetime sales per entry. Even XCOM 2 did about 2-3 million copies. Compare that to the heavy hitters in the AAA space where less than 5-10 million copies sold is a failure, and you have what is a beloved and self-sustaining studio where resources are more limited than at the Ubisoft's of the world.

Now, with Midnight Suns you might think the Marvel license would give them more leeway for polish and the like, but per Rob Zacny's interview with Jake Solomon on Waypoint Radio, it seems that Marvel approached them as fans of Firaxis to try this weird experiment of a game. Add to that the general difficulties developing during COVID, it makes sense why this game would be scoped with mediocre graphics and optimization on even the big boy consoles. Personally, I don't mind it because the gameplay loop is so solid, and they do go all out on the important stuff like combat animations. But here's hoping this game becomes the smash hit needed to justify a truly polished sequel.

@navster15: So I want to be clear that I liked the game quite a bit. I am not ragging on it overall. But I strongly disagree with you here.

For one thing, the game has an absolute overload of cosmetics. Every character has tons of outfits and color palettes and there are in game lootboxes to the point where I woud be surprised if they were not planning FTP at some point in development. It has more cosmetics than a non-microtransaction game I can name from the last 10 years. So they had plenty of budget for costumes and such. They could have made fewer and made them better.

For another the game spends resources in other weird ways. It has great cinematics for some reason. It has tons of voice acting. Way too much voice acting. WAY WAY WAY too much voice acting to the point where every conversation could stand to have lines cut. And these are name voice actors too. You are telling me that they could afford to have Michael Jai White recording lines for what must have been weeks but not someone to add some polygon hairs to Wolverine's arm?

They had money for a whole fully voiced book club in a tactics game. Come on now.

The game just comes off as half baked in weird ways. Like you can't actually pause the game in the real time segments. People will just keep talking in the background. You're telling me that was due to budget? They could afford Brian Bloom, Steve Blum, Yuri Lowenthal but not someone to program a pause function?

@bigsocrates: I think there's a major difference in making more content like skins and dialog and making a highly detailed world with modern AAA facial animation. The latter is many times more complicated than the former, especially if you're working with established, if a little outdated, tools. And yes, making the book club or EMO KIDS sidequest is a lot more simple when all you have to do is record the actors and put together a scene with off-the-shelf animations.

As for comparing voice actor budgets to anything else, I think the peek we got into actor pay with the Helena Taylor debacle shows that even top-tier talent is making maybe a few tens of thousands of dollars for their work. Michael Jai White may be a known Hollywood talent, but he's likely not making a crazy amount for his work here. All in I wouldn't be surprised if the total voice budget was less than $1 million, which would barely make a dent in hiring more artists and programmers to upgrade the visuals.

For the bugs and lack of polish, that sucks but isn't too surprising for a game that was repeatedly delayed and snuck into the 2022 release calendar. Hopefully patches will improve it in time.

@navster15: Who's talking about a highly detailed world with modern AAA facial animations? I specifically said that I gave them a pass for the Hunter's weird mouth animations. I get that this is a tactics game and isn't going to get God of War budget. I'd much rather have the underlying tactics gameplay be solid (and the combat was, indeed, very good.)

But asking them to make Wolverine's arm look above PS1 quality is a totally different issue. You'll have to explain to me how all the artists working on outfits and alternate color schemes couldn't have spent that time making a better base hair texture for Wolverine that would stand up to the game's camera placement because I have no idea how making textures for a costume is fundamentally different from making textures for an arm.

I would add that the Bayonetta situation was different because that's her only character. Voice actors CAN make good money. Not Brad Pitt money, but good money. I don't know if the budget was $1 million or higher for this game's voice acting but even a $1 million budget is still like $50,000 or more each for the various main characters. How much do you think it costs to pay an artist to make a decent arm hair texture?

And the game's script being way too long is a problem that was not caused by budget. That was just a lack of any editing and it would have cost less to record less and make the game better.

@bigsocrates: Well, with salary, benefits, insurance, taxes, and office costs, the typical tech employee in the US would cost about $100-150K per year. If you want to staff up your art department, that quickly adds up and exceeds $1 million in one year (distinctly different than a $1 million one time payment) if you only add 7-10 people. And given modern game dev uses art teams of hundreds of people, that actually isn't even that big of a staff-up. (And that's if you can even hire qualified artists in a constrained labor pool.) Could they have addressed Wolverine's arm hair, or the rampant clipping of objects, or the flat textures everywhere? Sure, but at a certain point with any project you have to triage resources and make the dang game. Which, yes, is essentially what editing is, and Firaxis decided to make this a big game overflowing with dialog and content at the expense of visual fidelity. I think I'm ok with that trade-off myself, as I loved going for walks with Peter Parker or working on Robbie Reyes's Hell Ride. But to each their own I suppose.

@navster15: Why do they have to hire full time employees when they already have full time artists doing work on random costumes nobody will really use. All it requires is saying "hey Tim, instead of making the 37th new outfit for use in the Abby only how about you take a glance over our base models and make sure that none of them have elements that are worse than what shipped with WCW/NWO Revenge for the N64?" Or pay an outside contractor to make a new texture. Or license a "hairy human skin" model from some asset licensing place. You don't need to hire full time people to do this stuff when you already have a staff doing totally unnecessary work and a lot of other options.

All of the dialog in the game is too long. ALL OF IT. It has that amateurish writing problem where they don't know how to just end a conversation without a bunch of boring goodbye throat clearing. Also they have a serious Mary Sue problem where at higher friendship levels all the characters just endlessly praise the Hunter no matter what that character's personality actually is. It's wildly uneven. But that's more of a subjective thing. Maybe there's someone somewhere out there who loves that Majik fawns all over you and takes 3 minutes to say "talk to you later."

That arm texture is trash and it should have been fixed in some way and the fact that instead they spent those resources on optional costumes and also failed to allow for basic features like pausing in a single player game doesn't speak to ambitious scope it speaks to poor project management (as do the various bugs.) That doesn't make it a bad game, because it's not, but it has some baffling decisions. Including shipping with that texture.

@bigsocrates: I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like you're making a whole lot of assumptions about how game development goes without ever having been in the industry yourself. Asking "why is that Wolverine arm texture bad in a game based on one of the most currently profitable franchises in the world" isn't really a bad question, and asking "why wasn't this game released on last gen consoles" isn't a bad question either, but the people pumping out cosmetic costumes and the people penning dialog (mediocre or not) aren't necessarily the people working on Wolverine's arm texture or the people who could port the game to last-gen consoles. And those people might not be at all qualified to do so.

Here's another suggestion - perhaps there's a correct Wolverine arm texture in there somewhere, but some baffling bug prevents it from rendering correctly. Perhaps their texture streaming solution isn't so great and they were never able to get it perfect but it was deemed good enough and they had to get it out the door, so sometimes you just see a very low resolution version of a texture. I don't know. You don't know. I just think it's a bit presumptive to say they "could have spent some money here or there" without really knowing much about what went on behind the scenes. Throwing more money at a problem doesn't necessarily fix it, and getting someone into the studio on a contract to get their textures and such working right isn't necessarily the right call either.

"Turn-based" does not mean "not CPU intensive". I seem to recall XCOM 2 sometimes taking a little while to calculate the enemy team's turn before executing it. EDIT: I did read your comment about the staggered release schedule, I meant to note that the staggered release schedule gives some suggestion that perhaps they were concerned with getting this game in a state where they could reasonably ship it. If they had more time to take, surely they would want to release all the versions at the same time to get a bigger opening day. /EDIT

Camera angles in games with lots and lots of conversations aren't necessarily all hand-crafted, either. I mean, someone probably did place a camera here, and there's probably some code that says "in x circumstance, the game can use y camera angle" and the game happened to line this shot up for you.

@justin258: Whether it's an art asset issue or a QA issue it's the kind of thing that can be fixed. And it's not the only QA issue the game has. It also had progression blocking bugs (I ran into two, one minor and one major that blocked progression until they pushed out a patch, which was thankfully quick.) At the end of the day it's about project scoping and resource allocation. Obviously dialog writers aren't going to go in and make a new texture for Wolverine's arm, but they clearly did not budget enough time for polish or QA and spent a lot of resources doing weird stuff that mostly didn't work (not just the overlong dialog but a whole semi-connected realtime puzzle investigation mode that's quite extensive and pretty boring.)

It's true that there are multiple ways this could have happened. But it's also true that it likely happened multiple times during testing (these kinds of events are not rare) and they didn't fix it, or other more important things. A lot of games come in hot and janky these days, but this one was jankier than most and they deserve criticism for it.

And while turn based games can be CPU intensive all that it means is that the turns take a bit longer. It doesn't make the game unplayable. Again they have announced a Switch version. IF you're launching on Switch you're admitting that the PS4/Xbox One CPUs can handle this without too much sweat. They shipped on newer consoles first because they wanted to QA fewer versions. That sort of makes sense and I don't really blame them for it. But they still turned in a janky game. Whether fixing this would require making a better texture, fixing a texture loading bug or just adjusting camera angles (including hand coding this angle out of conversations with Wolverine) it's a fixable issue they didn't fix. And they spent a lot of resources on other stuff that didn't add much to the game (not just my opinion, widely shared.)

Just chiming in here to echo this. It's not that Wolverine's arm is an unforgivable sin, really. It's just that there are a lot of baffling design elements in Midnight Suns. They stand out more because other parts of it are really fantastic!

I've rarely felt so conflicted about a game. It's almost like the developers had some kind of Jekyll and Hyde thing going on.

@el_blarfo: I don't think it's Jekyll and Hyde. I think Firaxis did really well with the parts of the game that are their core competency (tactical combat) and not nearly so well with the other parts. They may even have been separate teams.

Imagine this pitch. "We're going to give the team who made the XCOM reboot some Marvel licenses to do this deep tactical game with superheroes that has a card game element to it." You'd be super intrigued, right?

Now imagine this pitch. "We're going to give the team who made the XCOM reboot some Marvel licenses to make a quasi-dating sim where you befriend a hodgepodge of Marvel heroes and they all tell you you're awesome." You'd be like..."uhhh....why are we doing this?"

Or "The team that made the XCOM reboot is going to make a supernatural adventure game where you explore the spooky grounds of a haunted abbey and also collect huge amounts of fungi and there are loot boxes in it!" You'd be like "Ummm...what?"

Actually the abbey stuff came off better than I'd expect from that pitch.

I think the team nailed the parts they had a lot of experience with and had a much more mixed record with the other parts. The thing I don't get is why they spent so many resources on those other parts and made them so elaborate and such a huge chunk of the run time.

And yes, Wolverine's arm isn't an unforgivable sin (I mostly thought it was funny) but it's frustrating that a game with combat this good has so much else wrong with it. I really thought it would be my GOTY after the first however many hours but right around the time I discovered that the book club really just was a book club where Wolverine complains about the snacks and Captain America gives super sincere thoughts about the latest book I was like..."why is there so much of this stuff?"

This game would have been a 9/10 with about half to two thirds of the non-combat stuff cut, and especially with the dialog trimmed down a lot.

@bigsocrates said:

Very possibly! What seems crazy to me is that no one ever seems to have checked if the two teams made a cohesive final product. Or they did and decided it was fine. Weird!

Yep, that was exactly my experience as well. Behold, my reaction to the game over the course of the campaign.

Totally agree. This game needed nothing so badly as a major edit. I could have tolerated the abbey stuff so much more if not for the sense that it was actively thwarting me from playing the game.

@cikame: He got a new tank top!