Deadpool is easily one of the most out-there characters in all of Marvel—that is often with regard to him being obnoxiously violent, lewd, and inappropriate, with Marvel's Midnight Suns almost working that level of violence into one of its abilities. This is what makes him fascinating as a character, but the balance between humor and violence is one that Marvel's Midnight Suns' Deadpool DLC needed to be careful with.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns deals with some dark subject matter that makes it stand apart uniquely from most modern Marvel endeavors, but it is still a teen-rated game. Therefore, there are boundaries that cannot be crossed, making Deadpool’s inclusion a much more challenging task from a design standpoint. In this regard, fun ideas were inevitably left on Firaxis’ cutting room floor.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ Creative Director Jake Solomon talked to Game ZXC recently about a potential idea for Deadpool that needed to be scrapped. Deadpool’s abilities and animations have great creativity and pair well with the hysterical actions he takes in story-related cutscenes. But fans will instantly notice that any of Deadpool’s typically graphic approaches to combat are far less over-the-top in Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ own tactics combat.
Deadpool’s Legendary card ability is called Burning Sensation and doubles damage based on his current En Fuego level. The animation cutscene for this ability sees Deadpool landing a ton of katana blows and a final front kick on the targeted enemy, leaving Deadpool visibly fatigued afterward. Game ZXC asked Solomon if there were any ideas for a card ability visualization that had not made it into Marvel’s Midnight Suns, to which Solomon replied,
“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.”
It would seem, then, that this idea had been toned down to appeal to the ratings board. This makes sense and is an inevitable compromise to make when including Deadpool in anything that cannot be mature-rated, but the Burning Sensation ability animation still packs a weighty punch with the comical flavor of Deadpool becoming weary. At the same time, Marvel’s Midnight Suns still saliently expresses Deadpool’s character through each of his animations and card abilities, as well as in cutscenes where he is interacting with other characters or breaking the fourth wall.
Deadpool’s DLC does this with a lot of creativity in lieu of a mature rating, in how his story develops. It is in these moments and throughout Deadpool’s unique card abilities that fans will get the most out of his character, indulging in the absurdity that the rest of Marvel’s Midnight Suns’ playable roster cannot stand.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is available now for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, with PS4, Switch, and Xbox One versions coming later.
