Unsurprisingly, there are already nude mods for Midnight Suns

Tony Stark is judging you
(Image credit: 2K Games)

Given how quickly nude mods for Spider-Man Remastered followed the wall-crawler's appearance on PC, it should be no surprise that modders have set to work removing the superhero underoos of Marvel's Midnight Suns as well. While mods for the XCOM games are traditionally a pretty big deal, the only mods I can find for Firaxis's latest are the horny ones. Its ModDB entry remains empty and there's no page for it at all on NexusMods yet.

The eternally thirsty modders of the LoversLab forum, however, wasted no time, and within a day of its release had discovered nude meshes in the game's files, added nipples, and made the first nude mod (initially for Magik, before adding Captain Marvel, Nico, and the Hunter). A more tasteful half-nude mod quickly followed, for those who'd rather have the ladies of the Midnight Suns merely topless while hanging out at the Abbey. Mods for male Midnight Suns sans trunks have yet to appear, despite requests, but I'm sure it won't be long.

It's always fascinating to see how determined modders manage these feats. In the case of Midnight Suns, which was made in Unreal Engine 4.26, that meant first using UModel to extract the assets so they could be modified. File encryption is supposed to prevent that, but encryption keys for Unreal Engine games are readily available online.  

Those assets could then be imported into other software like open-source 3D graphics toolset Blender for editing, though not without issue, as one modder discovered when characters' heads went missing and they developed additional bone sockets. The solution was to "set the scale of the object to 0.01 and also change the name of both the object and the armature to 'armature', so that Blender doesn't add an extra bone at the root", they discovered, which also fixed the missing head problem. "Apparently, the head wasn't actually invisible; it was just so gigantic that the game was placing it far up in the sky somewhere."

The inventiveness of modders, whether those serving the horny slice of the audience or otherwise, is always impressive. Back in 2021, Luke Winkie went on a journey to meet the modders determined to add nudity to the least likely games, finding that even pixel-art sandbox sim Starbound and sci-fi grand strategy game Stellaris weren't safe from their attention. For a game like Midnight Suns, where half the cast wear skin-tight fetishwear and also you can unlock swimsuits for them—no, really, it's a heck of a thing—it was only a matter of time.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.