Marvel's Midnight Suns uses a very versatile difficulty system that allows players to customize the game's difficulty according to their preferences, while also offering additional rewards to players who take on additional challenges and risks by turning it up.
Since Marvel's Midnight Suns has some challenging turn-based card combat that requires players to carefully consider their moves and plan out their actions accordingly, players will need to gauge their own capabilities and weigh the enhanced rewards with the additional challenge offered by each difficulty setting. To encourage this, the game gradually unlocks new difficulty settings as players continue through the game, allowing players to change difficulty between missions whenever they choose to.
How Difficulty Works
The Difficulty Settings in this game increase and decrease enemy health and offensive power, whilst reducing the number of revives players have access to. Additionally, players will have to contend with the injury system, weakening heroes who took a lot of damage in a previous mission if they didn't have time to rest before the next mission if they play on any difficulty above "Story" difficulty.
With Normal Difficulty acting as a baseline, offering two revives per mission as a safety net and a 25% bonus to gloss obtained from missions, while leaving enemy health and offensive power unchanged, each difficulty alters enemy power and offense. Each difficulty also grants a bonus to hero XP gain and gloss rewarded from missions, and difficulties above normal limit the player to one revive per mission.
Here's the breakdown of each difficulty and its changes to the gameplay:
Difficulty | Enemy Health | Enemy Offense | Revives Per Mission | Hero XP Boost | Gloss Boost | Other Changes |
Story | -25% | -33% | Infinite | None | None | None |
Normal | Unchanged | Unchanged | 2 | None | +25% | None |
Heroic I | +25% | +12.5% | 1 | +10% | +50% | None |
Heroic II | +50% | +25% | 1 | +20% | +75% | None |
Heroic III | +75% | +50% | 1 | +25% | +100% | None |
Ultimate I | +87.5% | +67% | 1 | +30% | +125% | Extra Enemy Reinforcements |
Ultimate II | +100% | +83% | 1 | +35% | +150% | Extra Enemy Reinforcements |
Ultimate III | +125% | +100% | No Revives | +60% | +175% | Extra Enemy Reinforcements |
As this chart shows, it can be very profitable to clear a mission on a higher difficulty, but the enemies will get considerably more dangerous as the difficulty is turned up higher. Additionally, players will have to deal with a greater quantity of enemies once they get into the Ultimate Difficulties since enemy reinforcements will be increased to make missions even more challenging.
Marvel's Midnight Suns is available now for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S, and coming soon to PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
