Earlier this year, Firaxis Games announced it was delaying Marvel's Midnight Suns to the second half of 2022. The supernatural take on the Marvel world drew some eyes, though its initial reveal may not have gone over as planned. But now, Firaxis has announced a new release date of October 7 and confirmed two characters (Spider-Man and Scarlet Witch) in a new Marvel's Midnight Suns trailer.

Alongside playing about five hours of Marvel's Midnight Suns, Game Rant was recently able to sit down with creative director Jake Solomon. We discussed a few of the things we had seen in the game, as well as various other elements and mechanics found in Marvel's Midnight Suns. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Q: I was not really expecting so many social elements. I literally just left a club meeting. How did all the social elements come to be in Marvel's Midnight Suns?

A: It grew organically because you'd love to know exactly the game we're making when you start, but we didn't. I thought what we were going to do is make XCOM with superheroes. And it just very quickly became apparent that that wasn't the right game. The tactical combat didn't work because the fantasy is totally different. Being a superhero is totally different than being some fallible soldier.

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And then what we did, what we knew from the beginning was, if we have superheroes that we all have an emotional connection to, I want to see them up close. I want to actually walk around in the base, but the minute you start walking on the base, you go, 'well it'd be really cool if I can talk to them.' It's like, of course, so let's start there. And then it'd be like, 'well, if I talk to them, that has to have meaning,' like of course. Then you're like, 'I really enjoyed the talk. We should have some other stuff in the base.'

You realize we're making an RPG at this point, and that wasn't the goal, but we're like, I guess, okay, now we're making an RPG. Then, we started adding these social events. And we always, we kind of fell into the idea of the fantasy with superheroes. Combat, of course, but then interacting with them off the battlefield is always a really fun thing, seeing how they interact with each other. And so we just started adding these elements to the game.

Plus, part of it, the Emo Kids especially, is one of those types of things. Like, we're telling this big dark story. They do this in comics, they do this in the movies a lot too, they do this in almost anything where the darker the story, the lighter you have to like try and work it. You can't take yourself too seriously, right? So we always wanted lots of humor in it. And we wanted things like the clubs to be like, there's a book club you can join. There's a shop class you can join. And so they're all meant to be moments where, okay, the heroes are doing very unheroic types of things and are interacting like normal people.

Q: How does Spider-Man stand out from other characters in Marvel's Midnight Suns?

A: What you try to do obviously, with like 12 known heroes and you get the hunter who has multiple branches of what kind of hero they can be, you try to find a way to push all the heroes out to some special place. To contrast Spidey with Blade, [Blade's] a very straightforward damage dealer and then he turns into damage over time, but he's like a very self-contained hero. He doesn't cost a lot of heroism, he doesn't generate a lot of heroism. He's kind of a loner, which is meant to match his personality. He's a straightforward damage dealer.

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So, Spidey does not do a ton of damage. He does a lot of damage to multiple targets, and he's also what we consider to be fast. He can attack multiple targets very easily, and he gets a lot of abilities that don't cost card plays. And so the more you play with him, the more it's like, 'hey, this ability is just free.' And his ultimate ability is like the next three Spidey abilities do not cost a card play. So you like hold on to Spidey, and then you're like, 'Alright, now I'm going to play that.' And then Spidey just goes nuts and does a ton of stuff, again, meant to match his personality. He's not a huge damage dealer, but he can attack lots of targets at once and he's super fast.

Q: Was it Yuri Lowenthal voicing him?

A: Yeah, it's Yuri. It's not like we're tied to the Spider-Man games, but he sounds like Spider-Man to me. He sounds like Peter Parker and so we were like we love him, and Marvel was like obviously, we love him as well.

It was a pretty easy choice then.

Yeah, it's a pretty easy choice.

Q: With the delay, what's really changed with the game?

A: Just polish. I know it's a boring answer, but it's true. The game is really the biggest game we've ever made. So, it has felt like it's been done for a long time. You could play through it for a while, and we've been working on it, balancing it. But it's just like, being the first one, like this is a brand new game, we just really want this one to be really, really polished. And so we just needed more time.

Q: When you say like, 60 hours, how much do you think of it is like narrative, cinematics, combat, and social elements?

A: 60 hours, I would say it's probably 60/40 with 60 being tactical combat and then the 40 being everything out of that. And the thing is, that can change drastically based on how much optional content players want to do. If they start exploring the Abbey grounds, if they go to every club meeting, if they start pursuing friendships with a bunch of heroes, then yeah, it could easily move that, you know. I think generally, during this onboarding phase that you guys are playing to right now, although you're towards the end of it, it's more Abbey than it is tactical combat, but then it kind of smoothes out, and then it's a lot of tactical combat, and then almost as much but maybe a little less cinematic stuff.

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Q: I've looked at the Abbey Grounds map a couple of times, and is it as expansive as it looks? Like all the gray areas, do they get filled in?

A: Oh yeah, it's pretty big. I think that you have to, obviously, figure out the sequence to unlocking these different regions. It's down to puzzles or challenge missions or mysteries that you have to solve or secrets you have to uncover. So, it unfolds over time, but yeah, it's pretty sizeable.

Q: When you were speaking, you talked a lot about the mission variety and the enemy variety. So far, I've basically just fought Hydra and I know there are others like the Lilin, but could you talk about how some of that variety is brought in?

A: Yeah, so we start the story sort of conventionally where you're fighting against Hydra, and then the idea is that, as Lilith grows stronger, then the Lilin start appearing. Actually what happens is you start seeing Hydra turn more occult and then the Lilin start appearing. Even through New York, which is the first act of the game, you'll also fight a lot of bosses, and so this is where a lot of the super villains come in. We call them the Fallen, so you might fight Fallen versions of Lilith's corrupted army of super villains.

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You'll fight them throughout New York as well, and characters we haven't talked about. We didn't even talk about Crossbones, and he shows up in the first cinematic, so there are a lot of like super villains you'll have to fight to. He's a very conventional enemy, but most of the villains are supernatural.

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Q: For Ghost Rider, I saw Johnny Blaze, we have Robbie Reyes, and there's one statue that said something about a Jeremiah Kaine. What can you say about Ghost Rider's role?

A: I'm a big Ghost Rider fan. That's where this story came from, Spirits of Vengeance. I was reading Spirits of Vengeance when you came in, in fact. Yeah, Ghost Rider is where this comes from. I love anti-heroes, right? So in the early 90s, when I was reading comics and everybody was an antihero, all the cool ones were antiheroes. So Ghost Rider, Punisher, Wolverine, and Venom were all anti-heroes and were so popular then.

And yeah, Ghost Rider. You start with Johnny Blaze, who's the original Ghost Rider. And then in the 90s, it was a guy named Danny Ketch. He had like these really cool abilities and he was actually the Ghost Rider during this story run. And now we have the new Robbie Reyes as Ghost Rider. And so yeah, we want to tell the story that's kind of this legacy from Johnny Blaze, the original Ghost Rider, to our new Robbie Reyes. That's actually part of the story that unfolds throughout the game, Johnny Blaze and Robbie Reyes and their relationship.

I would also say that, if played correctly, he's more challenging to play, but Ghost Rider is probably the most powerful character in the game. He absolutely is the strongest damage dealer, even more than Captain Marvel who is way up there. It's just Ghost Rider exacts a cost. Ghost Rider is incredibly powerful, but it'll be like okay, drain half of his health to then deal four times that to like an enemy. You have to play him just the right way, support him the right way, but Ghost Rider is insane.

We've shown a bit of it, but his Penance Stare is the coolest visualization the artists have made. It is crazy. He goes into the mind of the enemy, and the enemies like chained up. This giant Ghost Rider head appears, so yeah, he's awesome.

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Yeah. The Hell Ride cinematic is really nice too.

Yeah, that is really awesome. I mean, that's the fun thing is these heroes start with such abilities, like they have to, because heroes have to have awesome abilities at the start of the game. It was a challenge. You can't like say, 'Oh, you got Iron Man, but he kind of sucks. It's like, wait until you get him to level four and then he's got these awesome abilities.' We had to give them awesome abilities from the start, like Ghost Rider, right? Every hero has to start at 10. They get cranked up so high by the end. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, man, it fits that superhero fantasy pretty well.

Yeah, yeah.

Q: So how did introducing these like pretty serious cinematics into the battles come about?

A: I guess it just comes out of it being Marvel. We always knew, and now that the movies are popular, Marvel has become synonymous with 'Epic.' And so we were like, 'Okay, we have to have these really, really like hero-worthy cinematics.' The abilities have to be very cinematic. I mean, this is true. My art director, Dennis, like we were trying to nail that feeling of an ability. I was like, we'll start with Captain Marvel's punch. When he brought the first version back, I'm like, Jesus, that's way over the top.

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He's like, 'no, no, no, we'll just make everything bigger than that.' And I was like, 'Oh, okay. Oh, like, I feel like that's a bit much.' So yeah, I mean, a lot of it starts with they have to feel like the fantasy. And part of it, too, is because of the game we're making, right? Because what we're making is turn-based, we have control to say like, 'well, we can control the cameras during our abilities, we can actually take some time to set these things up.' I mean, we get the ability to say, 'all right, if the player is going to say I'm going to launch this ability,' at least we can give them a truly heroic cinematic display.

Q: I've watched, you know, some of the gameplay stuff you had put out. I think it was previously mentioned that Wolverine is unlocked around 10 to 12 hours in or something like that.

A: Yeah, I'd say even more than that. But yeah, yeah, 10 to 12 is probably right.

Q: At what point, crudely, would players have unlocked all the characters?

A: For all the characters, you have to beat the game. You have to beat the game to get the last one, yeah.

Q: I assume that's the super-secret last one?

A: That's one we have not announced yet. To unlock all the characters, you have to beat the game, and then we have a new game plus mode, so you will be able to use that. Yeah, we kind of meter out our heroes over the backend. We turn on new gameplay systems over the back half of the game, so the players are always like doing new stuff.

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Q: So you're saying there are more systems in the latter half of the game?

A: Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, a lot of the research that you're doing, like the later research will unlock a whole new thing. So just, for example, Magik has something called the Threat Room. If you do her research, you build this thing that builds a portal out in the yard, and then you can go through the portal, every hero can go through the portal once a day, and they fight by themselves against like waves of demons. I mean, there are just so many different facilities to build that do things like that. There's a mod system where, and this happens like 25 hours into the game, the abilities you start to get from the coil packs or you receive as rewards or from covert op missions, they start appearing with random perks on them.

So, it'll be an ability you've seen before, but now there's this random perk on it. It'll be like really straightforward like we've added the life steal ability, or it'll be more complex, where it's like, if you KO with this ability, you can conceal after that. And so, all of a sudden, you start being like, 'oh, man, I thought I had this perfect build for the characters I love but then they start getting these abilities. Okay, I need that one.' And because it's random, like you never know, some of them, you're just like, 'well, that's insane.' So part of the joy of the game is breaking it, right? That's what you're trying to do. Like, 'I can't believe I got these three things and they build up to this' and you're like, 'Alright, bye, everybody. I'm about to wreck the battlefield.'

When you start getting modded abilities, you can really break the game with these things. If you get them, you just start making an entire squad around this ability. It's like 'if I just draw this and use this, it's gonna like destroy things.'

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Marvel's Midnight Suns releases October 7 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.

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