The Medium is set to launch later this week and is one of the more interesting projects in recent memory. The game is a horror title, but done in the style of the early 2000s with fixed camera angles and a distinct focus on environment and storytelling. It is also the first major title to be a next gen only game for the Xbox Series consoles, though it will be coming to PC as well. While The Medium is the biggest game from developer Bloober Team, some were still quite shocked by how hefty the PC requirements actually were (you can see the full, updated list through here). The requirements don’t even list any for 60 FPS, and the highest goes as far as recommending a RTX 3080. Well, the developer has detailed why this is.
In an interview with VG24/7, Lead Designer Wojciech Piejko spoke briefly about those requirements. The Medium has a gameplay mechanic where you are playing two worlds at the same time, something that happens frequently throughout the narrative. That’s the main culprit as he says that the amount of process power to do that as well as add ray-tracing and other effects, such as HDR, needs a lot of processing power.
“You know, we are rendering two worlds at the same time, and if people want to render two worlds with HDR plus ray tracing, it requires really powerful hardware,” he explained. “We don’t want to put the specs on the internet and say “yeah, it’ll run smooth on your card”, and for it not to be true. Our game flows between worlds, sometimes you are only in one world, sometimes in two at the same time. If you launch the game and at the beginning you only have one world, and then you will get to a two-world situation when the game renders two, you know frames will drop and of course it’s not good. We have to put the specs for the most power-demanding situation and that’s why the requirements are high.”
You can see some of that dual world gameplay through here, as the first 18 minutes of the game has been revealed. The Medium will also release on Xbox Series X/S on January 28th.