At one point the launch of the Xbox Series X/S was going to be a bit spookier with The Medium, the latest horror game from Bloober Team. It was not to be, however, and the game was pushed into the beginning of this year. It’s an interesting looking title that has a very unique dual reality gameplay mechanic. It’ll also utilize the SSD in the Xbox Series X/S version, but for those on PC with just the regular ol’ HDD, you can still come along for the ride.
In an extensive interview with Wccftech, Producer Jacek Zięba talked about various aspects of the game. The SSD was a big marketing point for the game, but for those on PC, you can play it from a computer that has just an HDD, even if the recommendation is for an SSD. There could be noticeable differences, such as loading and some pop-in, but he thinks PC players will be mostly fine.
“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.”
He also goes on to reveal that the game will have performance and quality mode options, which alter things like ray-tracing, reflections, and RTAO. It’s not clear if that will also be an option on the console side, as they say they are still in the process of optimizing the game there.
“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 is set to release on Xbox Series X/S and PC on January 28th. We actually got to sit down with Zięba and chat about The Medium as well, which you can check out in full through here.
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