Marvel's Midnight Suns was originally going to have loads more story chats in it

rockpapershotgun.com:

Marvel's Midnight Suns may be a turn-based tactics game first and foremost, but it also has a substantial RPG element that drives both the story and the interpersonal dramas of its superhero teams between missions. When you and your squad head back to your Abbey HQ, there are side stories and quests to investigate around the Abbey grounds, items to find, and more. It's a sizable part of the game, but at one point it was even bigger, creative director Jake Solomon tells me at GDC.

"It's crazy, if you go online, you can see all the Midnight Suns cutscenes and they're three hours long. That's as long as a movie," he says. But during the last year of development Solomon reveals "we cut 30 conversations from the game, like 30 scenes. We cut a ton, because we realised this is just simply too much."

Solomon cites two main reasons for enacting these cuts: "Number one, it's too much for the team. They already had so much that they were working on. And two, for the player. There a lot of these things that were not necessary conversations, and so we ended up cutting [them] in the last year [of development]."

Of course, he's fully aware that Marvel's Midnight Suns is still a "very, very big game", even with all the cuts they made. He also says he still loves how long the final version ended up being. "I love being able to lose myself in a game like that," he says. But as creative director, he was also very aware of the effect its size would have on his wider team, and he goes on to say there was "a concerted effort" among him and his fellow developers at Firaxis to find ways of trimming the story down.

"The team needs breathing room," he tells me. "They're drowning under all this narrative we piled on them, and so we said, 'All