SPOILERS AHEAD FOR MARVEL'S MIDNIGHT SUNSMarvel’s Midnight Suns released its first post-launch DLC today and Deadpool as a playable character. This means that fans can now take Deadpool with them on story-related and general missions for tactical gameplay, as well as enjoy his company while lounging in the Abbey. Game Rant recently sat down to discuss Deadpool and what the first of four DLCs will include with Creative Director Jake Solomon.
Game Rant and Solomon talked about how Deadpool iterates on Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ gameplay from the base game, the challenges encountered in designing Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ own interpretation of Deadpool, and what fans can look forward to in future DLCs. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: Nolan North and Deadpool are practically synonymous at this point — how important was it that he be cast in the role?
A: We did not consider anything else. For a while we toyed with the idea of putting Deadpool into the base game, in fact, but—I mean very, very early on, we didn’t really work on it—but I’ve never pictured Deadpool as anything other than Nolan North. So yeah, I mean he’s a big part of the delivery for sure.
Q: So gameplay-wise, how does Deadpool stand out from other characters in Marvel’s Midnight Suns?
A: Well. So, the thinking here, when we were designing our DLC characters, the thinking was to make them more mechanically interesting than our—not more, but like, we felt freer as designers to kind of get a little weirder with it, because we felt that if you’re playing the DLC, you had an interest in the base game. So Deadpool, definitely, has the potential to be the most powerful, you know, single-target damage dealer in the game. But, you have to play him in a very specific way. So he has this En Fuego mechanic where he gets on a run, and if he starts knocking a bunch of people out, as long as he doesn’t take damage, basically he builds up his strength when he knocks people out, and then he loses strength when he gets damaged.
So you have to really think about like, 'okay, who’s targeting Deadpool, how can I protect him, how can I give him way more KOs than these other heroes,' and then Deadpool builds and builds and builds. But he’s a little streaky, so you have to really be careful about him, and so he’s really fun to play from a mechanical standpoint, you know—disclaimer being I’m the guy who designed him, so you know, like, ‘oh my god, he’s brilliant! I don’t know, it’s a masterclass, it’s a masterclass in character design’, I guess. Um, we’ll see what people say when they play him.
Well I loved the En Fuego mechanic, where if you use—I think it’s called ‘All Together Now’?
Oh, yeah.
And you have two other characters who are getting a lot of KOs back-to-back, then like, you’re just stacking all of that En Fuego onto him.
Yes, and that was a very specific ability visualization that I called out by the way. I was like, look, I want it to be a rainbow, I want a unicorn to run across the top, so yes, I also love the visualization of that. But yeah, that one’s nice, actually, the upgrade to All Together Now is nice because then you can involve your squadmates as well.
Q: What was more challenging from a development perspective — designing how Deadpool’s abilities would translate to tactical gameplay, or designing how he would fit into the Abbey alongside other big personalities?
A: Definitely the Abbey stuff. Because tactically, you know, it’s funny because when I think of who the spirit—so, whenever we talk with Marvel Games, we’re really, really hardcore comics people. It’s always a pretty friendly, collegial conversation with Marvel Games when we talk about our characters. But it’s always about like, what’s the spirit of the character? Like there are no rules they have to follow. Like the movies aren’t canon, the comics aren’t even canon, and we have our own universe. And so we can change this, change that, but you can’t change the spirit of the character. And so for us, the spirit of Deadpool is he’s—when you talk about him from a comics standpoint, he’s ultra-violent. Right, like he’s a really violent character. He’s funny, he’s fourth-wall-breaking, but he’s gotta be pretty violent.
That’s who Deadpool is. But then also as a narrative character, he is very funny, fourth-wall-breaking, he’s quippy, but he is actually a pretty deep character. Like he’s not just funny to be funny, so a lot of that’s written into his Abbey story. If you develop a friendship with him, you can talk with him about deeper things. But definitely the most challenging part, I think my writers would say is just all the butting up against legal and ratings boards stuff because Deadpool also should—his humor—should be as over the line as possible.
And we’re a ‘T for Teen’ game, so how do we really, like—we love these characters, so how do we make it feel like, ‘oh that’s definitely Deadpool’, you know, and so trying to push the humor. It’s easier for us because we have a game that’s supernatural, it’s a setting that Deadpool doesn’t make a ton of sense in when you first look at it, and so it’s fun to have him there, and he takes the air out of everybody, and his humor’s over the line where people are talking about really serious stuff and then Deadpool comes in and says something completely inappropriate.
But it was really challenging, the writers were amazing, did an amazing job. You don’t want him to undercut the story in such as way where as a player, like, I care about this story, and then Deadpool’s making you feel like a fool, right, like he’s making you feel silly for caring about things. So you have to be careful that he’s not making fun of the player, making fun of the other heroes, or making fun of the things you’re trying to achieve, because you’re trying to save the world. So Deadpool doesn’t try to make you feel silly, and it’s just a real fine balance. He’s not like any other characters.
I think the thing that was tough with us was, you just forget how weird Deadpool is in terms of what he can do. So you gotta remind yourself like, wait a minute, Deadpool wouldn’t approach this situation—you can write a really cool scene, and you’re like, that type of Deadpool would be funny. But he’s way more than that, right, because of the manner of the fourth wall breaks and things like that. But he was really, really fun and that’s why he’s kind of like the first character of DLC. He was so fun to do after we finished our base game stuff.
Q: Were there any particularly fun ideas for a Deadpool card ability that Firaxis wanted, but didn’t make it into the game?
A: No, although, at one point he was way too powerful. I kind of scaled it back a little bit. At one point his Legendary ability, which is called Burning Sensation, it was called ‘Maximum Effort.’ And then the Marvel Games guys were like, ‘that’s from a movie.’ And I was like ‘oh, yeah, I’m sorry,’ I was like, ‘that’s my bad.’ But no, in terms of anything we wanted to do with him—I think the one thing we—okay, there is one.
The one thing we didn’t do was during Burning Sensation, I wanted his target to become covered with a sort of blurred-out, censored filter. Like the idea is there’s so much violence and there’d be sounds of splatting and all this stuff—and you can see in the ability, like I really wanted him to get tired halfway through, where he’s like, ‘oh my god, I’m just hacking this person to pieces’—but we wanted to censor the body with a blurry, censored filter and show a bunch of stuff on-screen. We didn’t end up going that far, but that was an idea we had.
Q: Does Deadpool attend any clubs at the Abbey if players recruit him in the middle of a new playthrough?
A: He does not, so, he’s fully featured—all the DLC characters are pretty fully featured, they’ll even comment on the main story if you have them unlocked, they can have all their friendship conversations, they’ll have all the outfits, the hangouts, you know, all that stuff. But no, Deadpool is not in any clubs, and that would be… something. That would be something.
Do you know which Abbey club you would have wanted Deadpool to be a part of if that had been possible?
Book Club. No question. Everybody in that club is so overly serious besides Wolverine, like, 100 percent. It would be Deadpool. Something like Fifty Shades of Grey, his book would be something where you’re like, ‘oh?!’ And then Wolverine would probably like it, I don’t know. So yeah, I would definitely put him in the Book Club.
Q: Seeing how Doctor Doom is mentioned again following the base game’s post-credits tease, and Deadpool blatantly asks if he’ll be in the sequel, can you speak to how much of a sequel has already been planned at this point?
A: When we were making the base game, Doom didn’t fit into the story we were trying to tell. He’s his own thing, of course. But we just put him as a post-credits scene because we were like, well, we always talk about technology—so the base game’s story. Technology and mysticism, right, so it’s Tony Stark combined with Doctor Strange. And even on the bad guys’ front we always said it’s Lilith and her demons combined with Hydra, and they’re sort of like a tech-based group. And we were like, the ultimate—there is one person that tech and magic live together in perfectly, and that’s Doom. So, that’s why he was in the post-credits scene.
Q: Is it fair to assume that Venom, Morbius, and Storm’s DLCs will all connect as a narrative throughline following Deadpool’s DLC?
A: Yes. So Deadpool has his story, but it’s picked up by each character, right? So they each have their own take on that story. If you think of the comics, right, a lot of times what they’ll do is have this big event. And then they’ll have like, character issues where it’ll be like Deadpool, but it’ll be branded, you know, like this is this big event. And so we view it as that where it’s like okay, this is Deadpool’s arc in the storyline.
Venom pushes the storyline a little further—and they can be viewed sequentially—and then Morbius pushes it even further, and Storm kind of pushes it to its almost-ultimate conclusion, but if people own all four DLCs, there is an actual bonus mission that happens after all four DLC. So if you own all four, then after Storm unlocks this special bonus mission that ties the entire story together with all four of these characters.
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Marvel’s Midnight Suns is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4, Switch, and Xbox One versions coming later.