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You confirmed that The Medium will feature combat through the protagonist's unique powers. How prevalent is the action element in this game, then?
While action is prevalent throughout The Medium, it’s not the focus of the game. Instead, we
use it to punctuate and enhance the story we are telling. We really want players to experience and feel the mystery alongside Marianne as she unravels it.
Our action sequences are more about Marianne’s survival than combat, so lean closer to those in Amnesia than something more action-focused, like Resident Evil. As such Marianne’s powers are primarily there to aid in her defense and help her escape the enemies she encounters.
You've previously cited the next-gen Xbox's SSD as a critical factor to enable the Dual Reality gameplay. However, it doesn't seem like there is an SSD requirement on PC. Will loading times on PC be much slower than on Xbox Series S or X?
It goes without saying that the arrival of new consoles allows us to work with greatly improved hardware, and this is undoubtedly the case with the Xbox Series X. At Bloober we take advantage of level-streaming tech to load all titles, so the inclusion of an SSD in the new Xbox has allowed us to take things to another level.
As we’ve been using level-streaming in our games for a long time, we have made every effort to ensure that the experience on a PC running the recommended specs is as close as possible to that on the new Microsoft console. For PC players, SSD is recommended but not required, so yes, loading times will be increased when using an HDD. That being said there's quite a bit of difference between console and PC architecture.
To get a little more technical, PC linear transfer from a standard HDD is 100MB/s on average, while the previous generation of consoles have just a third of this value. So when you couple that with the IO cache that a PC’s operating system manages, you get loading times of only a few seconds longer than the average SSD. Sure, you’ll see some texture pop-in here and there, but you’ll still be able to enjoy The Medium from an HDD.
Which ray tracing features will be available in The Medium? Are there any technical differences between the various versions in this and other regards (resolution, frame rate, etc.?)
We have two supported ray tracing modes for The Medium - Performance Mode that has enabled reflections and RTAO in all performant location (when only one word is rendered), and Quality Mode, which features reflections, RTAO, hybrid translucent, and some RT shadows enabled for the whole game world. The latter is paired with DLSS and some other Nvidia improvements but requires a lot of hardware power.
The team is still working to optimize The Medium across Xbox Series X and S and we will be
able to share more details on these versions closer to launch.
The Medium Interview - Bloober Team on Exclusivity, Ray Tracing Support
We've interviewed Bloober Team to pry out some additional tidbits on The Medium, the upcoming psychological horror game due later this month.
