The Medium Lead Designer Talks Challenges Of Developing Their Biggest Title During A Pandemic

Later this week, we will get The Medium from Bloober Team. The game is set to be one of the first major next gen exclusives for the Xbox brand, and also looks to be the biggest game that the studio has ever made. It was also being developed in part in the midst of the global COVID pandemic, which proved to be challenging for everyone.

In an interview with VG24/7, Lead Designer Wojciech Piejko talked about the challenges the team ultimately faced. While he didn’t get into specifics, it was clear that the ambitious nature of the game’s dual reality gameplay aspect proved difficult, saying that a lot of the collaborative effort around development was altered. The game also suffered a minor delay, originally being slated for the launch of Xbox Series X/S. In the end, though, he said he was happy about how it all ended up.

“We made the game during the pandemic with a lot of, you know, bad things happening during the development,” he said. “Creating the game with two words at the same time was really challenging for us because it was the first time when we don’t know what to do with some things, yeah. It was not like, you know, normal development like okay, I want Shooting mechanics, okay, let’s see how the best shooters are doing this, yeah, and you can, you know, reverse engineer something and design it. The Medium requires a lot of iterations, like a blind iteration sometimes, because okay, ‘what do we do with this?’ and ‘I don’t know, let’s try this and this and this,’ and we’ll see.

Producer Jacek Zięba added: “Creating The Medium was a leap into the unknown, like you know, to find new land in a way, and we found it, and we’re happy.”

The Medium is set to launch January 28th for Xbox Series X/S and PC. You can check out some gameplay features as well as the most recent updated PC requirements for the game through here.