The new trailer made me laugh. The score makes it seem like it should be a dark, dramatic piece like "Logan" or "Watchmen" or something but it's a bunch of clips of rather silly-looking, brightly-colored superheroes doing superhero stuff. Like the marketing guys and the art director have never talked to each other.

I think I'm less excited after seeing the gameplay trailer. At first it seemed like Divinity Original Sin in terms of the movement economy not being tied to a strict grid as well as a reliance on environmental hazards. I'll just go out on a limb and guess that it CAN'T have a story better than DOS2, no matter how you build Character McNoFace. It's not like the new XCOM's are known for a great narrative but it's going to be all the more disappointing since they even have access to such iconic characters. Now all I want is an XCOM3. I'm surprised they didn't at least do a DLC based on the Templars' ending in WOTC which eludes to one of the classic games (Terror from the Deep).

The more I watched it though the more it felt like a glorified Marvel bowling game. The enemies basically exist as pins to be knocked over in as few chains as possible. Reminds me a bit of Crash Mode from Burnout where the combo chains are key to success. I almost wish they did lean more into a typical XCOM design because from what I'm seeing it looks to have more in common with Angry Birds or Boom Blox. I could be wrong and the combat encounters might flow nicely in the finished game. Firaxis do have a knack for some creative enemy types in XCOM but I think they lose some novelty of the property for me if they don't rope in many named villains from the comics.

They showed the gameplay today and this is really what it looked like.

Maybe it ramps up on a higher difficulty but I don't know how far you can go on this set up to really make it tactical. Placement and location kind of IS tactics. To me this game might be a lot about kind of setting up your characters and developing them part most of all, plus seeing heroes do hero stuff like in the comics.

I do think it also has a bit of a styles clash in how kind of grim dark it looks but it actually seems like a goofy comic book feel to a lot of it too. Maybe that will work though.

Soooo, how we feeling? Excited due to the Gloomhaven comparisons. Can’t wait

I was very pleasantly surprised to see the positive reviews hit. The early previews had this looking very rough, but I'm glad to see that the final product turned out well. Excited to give it a shot in a couple of days.

I'm super excited at this point. I'm deep in Pyre right now (y'all ever heard of Pyre? it's pretty good) but when I get a chance, I'll pick this up. I watched a gameplay stream the other day and listened to Waypoint's interview with Jake Solomon, which definitely got me hyped.

The streams I've seen out of Firaxis proper have always included moments where they've almost squad-wiped. I can't tell for sure, but I wonder if that's intentional to combat the sentiment I've seen that the heroes are too powerful and the game will be a cakewalk. Maybe I'm too cynical about PR streams...

One small quibble from what I've seen, I would have liked more of the characters from the Midnight Sons comics. I'm holding out hope they'll show up on the periphery of the playable group. To be clear, I'm happy to see Lilith and the others get some attention at all, but I would have loved to see the reactions of modern fans to the likes of Hannibal King and Victoria Montesi.

Did they say anything about the Quick Look that was scheduled for yesterday? I’d like to see this thing in action, it might be an Xmas present to myself.

EDIT: Seems like Jan’s save got borked. That poor guy and his save luck…

I’m not a Marvel Comics guy, and I have had my fill of the MCU movies….and yet I love this game.

Ive been really enjoying it. Of course, the game crashing everytime i send my character to bed is far less enjoyable

Let me tell about a little game called "Marvel Snap"...

I'm very into this game so far.

The combat is great. It feels like a less punishing Gloomhaven with the focus being on positioning, resource management, and trying to combo your abilities as effectively as possible. It's all very distinct from XCOM, but the flow does sometimes feel reminiscent of really going off on a turn with a ranger in XCOM 2.

The game doesn't really look next-gen, but it looks a lot better than I expected. The character animations in combat in particular work really well at making everything feel very impactful. I had a few performance issue in the my first couple of hours on the PC version, but it must have been just shader compilation or something because it's been smooth sailing since then.

There is maybe a little too much stuff between the combat, but I've found myself mostly liking it. I know the primary comparison point on this stuff has been Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but I'm mostly getting Mass Effect vibes from it. There's a lot of interaction between the characters in your home base of The Abbey, and they're constantly commenting on the current events of the story in a way that feels dynamic like what you'd get from the Normandy crew.

I wish there was less chaff between missions, because I think the tactics part of this game is incredibly slick. Like, the writing has grown on me over time and I think their takes on some of the marvel characters are fun, *but* I just wanna agonize over who Ghost Rider should knock into a hell pit

I'm really digging this as well. It's absolutely a distinct beast from XCOM. The combat has a totally different action economy that I find really interesting and fresh.

I do wish there was about 10% less RPG stuff, and the characters were about 10% less chatty. I enjoy it, but the ratio of Abbey social time to doing missions feels slightly off.

Overall, though, it's a good time!

Has anyone here splurged for the more expensive versions? It looks like they're just charging for cosmetics and $2 a pop sight-unseen for skins seems a bit high to me.

@constantk: The legendary edition does include the season pass which will eventually include the DLC characters, but at the moment, it's all just pointless cosmetics. I'm not really a fan of most of those skins either - they're overdesigned and don't really mesh well with the standard skins.

@constantk: I have not, and for the most part, even the skins included with the standard edition haven't been interesting enough for me to switch them up.

I'll probably just go for a season pass if the DLC character sound interesting. What a shocker, one of them is apparently Deadpool, which... sure why not. Not sure who else is on the docket.

ETA: It's Deadpool, Venom, Storm and Morbius. Color me an intrigued maybe. Depends how much I feel like replaying this thing by the time they come out. We'll see if I get that periodic XCOM itch with this game too.

Yeah, after posting here I found this page on Firaxis' site (https://midnightsuns.2k.com/latest/season-pass-details/). There are also images out there of the various skins if you do a quick search.

Paying up front for DLC content, even if it's more clearly defined than these 4 packs are, is such a bad practice. It's not tempting to me, but I hate that it's so common from AAA publishers.

Is anyone else experiencing game crashes every single time your character goes to bed? Playing on Steam Deck. It seemed to take a patch a day or so ago which fixed it for a few hours but its back to crashing every night. Reloading the checkpoint after reopening the games fixes the issue, but only for that day.

@cornfed40: I haven't seen that specific issue, but I did have a reproducible crash where every time I tried to overwrite one manual save, the game would crash. I could create a new save without issue and overwrite it without causing a crash, but that one specific save just couldn't be overwritten without crashing the game.

Since the game does autosave right before you go to sleep, I'm wondering if it could be a similar issue.

I would now like to amend this to 33% each. Still LOVE the combat, still love these characters, but man, the between-mission stuff is getting to be really dull.

I just started this today, and boy Rob Zacny was not kidding about the overbearing level of quippiness in this game my GOD.