In less than a month, Two Point Museum will be launching to old and new fans alike, and we were able to chat with Two Point Studios’ executive producer Jo Koehler and design director Ben Huskins about the upcoming sequel.

The pair provided insight on the new Expedition System, the creative tools and humor interlinked with the game, and, of course, their relationship with the Two Point community and the development process of Two Point Museum.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

We’re Going On An Expedition!

OMG: Two Point Museum introduces several changes and new features to keep gameplay fresh and exciting; one of those is Expeditions. How did this feature come about and how does the expedition feature give players freedom to express their creative ideas?

Ben Huskins: The Expedition system is something that we latched onto early on as an idea of how we’ll be getting these exhibits and collecting them to display in your museum. We immediately got excited about you going out there and getting these exhibits, and we explored quite a few different versions of it, like seeing your staff doing things on the expeditions in 3D and everything.

It’s a feature that we’ve iterated throughout the development. We loved this idea of it giving you this sense of adventure in the game, and the expedition system felt like it’s a great way of getting you in that feeling of exploration through the expedition maps, and that sense of discovery when they come back with something in a crate.

OMG: In previous games, features were offered to the players right from the start, but in Two Point Museum, unless you do expeditions you won’t get to have enough buzz to move forward. Was it a conscious decision from the team that the expedition feature gated players into progressing in a certain pace?

Huskins: Something that we’ve always done is we want to ease people into the game, we don’t want to overwhelm people at the start. Gradually easing them in felt like something that would fit quite nicely with the expedition system as soon as we got into the idea of the player discovering these map fragments and then discovering points of interest on the maps.

That felt like that would naturally fit with that progression system so that you start off doing fairly low-risk expeditions, but also where you’ll find the lower buzz exhibits, and then you can branch off from those points of interest on the map and find more exotic exhibits as your explore and get to some of the more challenging expeditions as well.

Koehler: More risk, more reward.

Huskins: Exactly, so definitely, as you get to the further reaches of the maps, players will start to encounter all sorts of more challenging expeditions where lots of weird things can happen to your teams that you send on these expeditions, and these really excite us.

Creativity versus Productivity

OMG: Design-wise, was moving away from a room-focused gameplay like in Two Point Campus a huge consideration from the start in the development process of Two Point Museum to give the players more creative freedom?

Kohler: I like the freedom to build the museum how you want to, and it really looks incredible. We’re quite proud of that, especially seeing players now, building up their museums, we also got modding, which is going to be available at release, so there are some people playing around with the modding system and adding their own wallpapers, which is just incredible to see.

Huskins: We’re quite keen to just really double down on those creative tools, we did a bit of that in Two Point Campus compared to Two Point Hospital. Two Point Museum felt like the right game to get into getting players to decorate because that’s kind of the whole point of Two Point Museum is that creating a space to inspire you and show off these amazing collections that they have.

It felt like the right game to give people that level of control, and as you mentioned, we moved away from room-focused gameplay. Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus were compartmentalized around classrooms and treatment rooms, that sort of stuff. We’re keen to make it more freeform.

Koehler: In Two Point Campus, everything ends up looking quite similar with the rooms. Two Point Museum, you start off with a blank space on pretty much every museum.

Huskins: You can very much play as a decorator, but obviously decorating in a way that’s personalized to you. But you can also use the same tools to play as a sort of business efficiency person, where you can send guests to a gift shop here and make sure they go through past the cafeteria, you can make a kind of linear roller coaster museum where they have to go exactly down the route that you create. Or you can have it branching so the guests get to choose which way they go next.

Is This A Joke To You?

OMG: In Two Point Museum, how did you ensure that your signature brand of humor was kept in the game and can you give us an example of particularly humorous moments that really make a mark with the team?

Huskins: Definitely. We realized quite early on that the exhibits in the Two Point Museum are hero items.

We wanted the exhibits to get across that charm and that humor but at the same time, something we do with our games is that we have a bit of a mixture of the more grounded elements with the more wild and wonderful things that exist in the world of Two Point County.

We’ve also done more with the radio, the DJ has a show “Digging Deep” who dives into all sorts of discoveries and mysteries around the county. So I felt that that was a nice element that ties in with the museum-specific gameplay. That combination of the quirky exhibits mixed in with the guest interactions, we didn’t want it to just be guests coming through and looking at exhibits and then moving on.

We wanted to try and make these things as interactive as possible because it’s the personality you get from the animations, either from the exhibits themselves or the characters interacting with them.

Koehler: If you came across the clown farm, when you’re playing. It’s a big clown, and eats and spits out clowns. I love it!

Huskins: When guests go in, they become clowns.

Koehler: And they just become clowns after that. Of course. (Laughs)

Huskins: The Big Chomper, that’s another great one in the Botany category that has these tendrils that fly around, and it’ll pick up the visitors and then swallow them and then spit them back out. It felt like there’s a lot that we can do, taking something from the real world that you might expect to see in a botanical museum.

Community Service

OMG: How did the community’s input influence the development of Two Point Museum? Did they have specific suggestions that led to actual upgrades or improvements in this game? Were there any particular learnings from Two Point Campus that you implemented? Like let’s do this this time around in Two Point Museum?

Huskins: Something that we really like to do is listen to community feedback and think about what updates we’d like to do with Two Point Museum. We also have things we want to add to the game like post-release quality of life updates along with some of the feedback from Campus and Hospital that we weren’t able to add to those games.

For example, people have always asked for the ability to do Staff Zoning in our games. We’ve set up areas within the museum and then allocated staff to them, such as “I want you to work in this wing,” “I want you to be a dedicated security guard in the alien exhibits,” or “I want you to be a dedicated janitor for the botany exhibits.” Finally, we’ve been able to have that in Two Point Museum. It gives you that extra level of depth and management.

Koehler: In the creative side as well, we pull forward what we’ve done in previous games, and this time do a bit more. The color pickup was quite a big change that we made. It makes a huge difference when you’re playing, you’re playing in a creative way. The partition walls, we’ve had requests for that sort of thing, in previous games. In Campus actually, we’ve made a wall item, it’s just a wall but you can’t see anything on it. It was a fake partition wall.

Huskins: It didn’t work properly. (Laughs)

Koehler: It inspired everyone. We need to do this well. We need it to work properly. So we can put windows on them, the items on them. It’s really interesting to see by Two Point Museum’s release we can hear what people are asking for.

Huskins: The thing we’ve been able to do during development is get some members of the community to try out the game and give us feedback. That has been invaluable. There are so many bits of feedback that were very useful for them.

Special thanks to SEGA, Two Point Studios, Jo Koehler and Ben Huskins for this opportunity!

Two Point Museum will be launching on March 5, 2025, on PC, PlayStation 5, and Microsoft Xbox Series X|S with pre-orders now available on all platforms. 

Purchase the digital Explorer Edition to receive five days advanced access to the game starting today! (Feb. 28th) 

Pre-ordering Two Point Museum unlocks access to a spectacular Sonic-themed collection of items including Sonic and Shadow staff outfits, guest gift shop outfits and plushies for museum guests to purchase. Bonus museum customization options will also feature Sonic wallpaper, flooring and decorative statues. Watch the Pre-Order Trailer Here.