Why XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns will never be forever games like Diablo and Destiny

rockpapershotgun.com:

As you might expect from a roster of 12 Marvel superheroes (or 17, if you count the four extra DLC supes and its original, player-designed protagonist The Hunter), the lycra-clad buds of Marvel's Midnight Suns all look and feel substantially different from one another when it comes to combat. When Firaxis were designing the moveset for each hero, creative director Jake Solomon says he and fellow lead game designer Joe Weinhoffer would take turns being "point designers" for certain characters. "Joe was point designer on one hero, I was point designer on another hero," Solomon says, highlighting Magic and Iron Man as two of his own favourite heroes that he designed.

Both are what I'd call quite technical heroes, with Magic relying on careful battlefield placement to boot enemies into nifty magical portals, while Iron Man's most powerful abilities often only come from discarding other cards. But when I ask Solomon at GDC if he thinks he has a particular design 'style' that unites his crop of Marvel heroes, he says he loves being "bombastic".

"It would be that every character is overpowered," he laughs. "Typically, my feedback would be, as I'm playing through the game over and over and over again, […] 'This ability is underwhelming.'"

Underwhelming abilities are "poison" to Solomon. "If you're never going to take this ability, it feels like it breaks the entire hero. You really want the player to say these are all so good, I want to use this ability, I want to use that ability… So typically, it was always a case of pump it up, pump it up, make it more powerful, make it sexier, make it seem cooler, give it more effects."

In fact, Solomon tells me his pursuit of the ultimate OP hero moves was so powerful at times that it