Breaking New Ground(ed)

It’s been a stellar year for Xbox-owned studio Obsidian Entertainment, which released its first-person fantasy RPG, Avowed, earlier this year and is set to launch The Outer Worlds 2 in October. But sandwiched in between these two RPGs, like a crustless PB&J a five-year-old drops near the swings at their favorite park, is a third game for Obsidian’s biggest year yet. Revealed during Xbox’s marquee June games showcase, Grounded 2 is the surprise follow-up to the studio’s first venture into the survival genre, and perhaps even more surprisingly, it’s out this month.

Like its 2020 predecessor, Grounded 2 launched into Xbox’s version of early access known as Game Preview, giving players a chance to jump into the sequel while Obsidian is still actively developing it. While playing games early like this is commonplace in the indie scene, it remains a rarity to see a triple-A studio like Obsidian bare its flaws to let players enjoy a game still being worked on. But the team wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I think that there’s a level of transparency that is a double-edged sword at times, but once you commit to it and you’re consistent about it, it really helps manage the balance and build the trust with our community,” Obsidian vice president of operations and Grounded 2 executive producer Marcus Morgan tells me. “It’s about doing the best thing for the game, and we’re listening and we’re hearing players, and there’s faith that we’re going in the right direction based on their confidence in what they’re playing.”

Obsidian co-founder and Grounded 2 game director Chris Parker followed Morgan up, adding, “We can engage with the community at the very beginning of a feature and then really guide what its pathway forward in the game is going to look like with a lot of intentionality from working directly with the community on it. I think that changes your mindset about how you’re going to do something.

“You just can’t develop like that when you’re making a game that’s going to go worldwide launch, selling day one as done, maybe figuring out how to patch some feature people didn’t like later. Instead, it’s like, ‘Oh actually, we’re going to develop this to what we feel is a really nice 70-to-80% and then figure out how to finish it with all the people that actually are going to use it.’”

For Morgan and Parker, developing in Game Preview isn’t all that different from, say, releasing Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2 as feature-complete games on day one – they say it’s just more public. After all, whether it’s Game Preview players or playtesters under NDA, plenty of eyes are experimenting with the game, highlighting avenues of improvement, and helping the team decide on new features.

Before I ask Morgan and Parker about Game Preview development and the new features they’re most excited about in Grounded 2, though, I inquire about the first game. Why is 2025 the time to launch a sequel? Why close Grounded’s chapter rather than continue building on what’s already there?

I’m quickly corrected by Morgan, as he doesn’t see it the same way as I do.

“I don’t really see it as closing a chapter as much as I see it as a continuation and the final result of the experiment going right in terms of us dipping our toes into survival, adding the Obsidian elements that we love, like our story and branching endings,” he tells me. “It’s less of an ending and more pushing to Grounded 2 because we wanted to do bigger things.”

Key to Grounded 2 is Xbox Series X/S and PC advancements, as Grounded was developed with Xbox’s last generation of consoles in mind. The biggest and newest feature of Grounded 2 is Brookhollow Park, the new setting, which wouldn’t have been possible in the first game due to both its scale and the franchise’s transition to Unreal Engine 5. Parker explains Obsidian believes Grounded 2 is a beautiful game, but because it’s a survival game that aims to enrapture as many players as possible, it’s not going to push the beefiest PCs and Xbox Series X/S to the max just to run like its other games might. But the team is still very excited about Unreal Engine 5 and the new lighting and texture advancements in Grounded 2, amongst other features.

I tell the duo it’s such a great idea to move players from the backyard to a park, an obvious one, too. Apparently, it wasn’t as obvious to Obsidian as it wasn’t even one of the first options the team toyed around with before settling on Brookhollow.

Though the two remain mum about other options Obsidian explored before landing on Brookhollow, they tell me the studio held hot debates about reusing the yard and expanding it. The team knew it wanted new biomes and explored man-made ways to bring new environments to the yard, but it ultimately landed on a park. “You can have a picnic area, a snack bar, a pond, a fountain, a maintenance shed, bathrooms, and a jungle gym, and then figure out how to have an ice cream cart tipped over or a refrigerator in the maintenance shed for workers to create cold environments [...] and we just kept building from there.”

I can already see how the usual sandbox of a park could serve as a great desert biome, while the fridge and tipped-over ice cream cart will make for ice-cold environments to explore. “Not all of our great ideas have persisted into Grounded 2 today, but the park was the one thing that seemed able to meld all these ideas together in a very organic, natural, and understandable way,” Parker says. “It felt really good to us.”

Obsidian describes Brookhollow as a “vibrant, nostalgia-soaked suburban wilderness” set in 1992, and what’s playable in Game Preview is essentially as big as the entire backyard of Grounded 1.0. Morgan says the team expects the final version of the park to be roughly three times larger than the backyard of Grounded. He’s quick to point out he doesn’t necessarily mean three times the weapons or three times the quests – it’s just a rough indication of “directionally, magnitude-wise, where we want to grow it.”

That doesn’t mean players should only expect one-third of a complete game from Obsidian if they hop into Grounded 2 today, though.

“I want to give a shout-out to another early access game, Hades II,” Morgan says. “Hades II really spoke to me in that when I played through it when it first launched, while I could see the game wasn’t done and where they were going, I felt very satisfied with the amount of content I got to play, the amount of polish there, and it was a real signal to me, like, ‘Oh, that’s the ambition we should go with.’

“When people come in to play Grounded 2 in early access, one of the guiding lights we would talk about a lot is if someone can play this version of the game and leave satisfied with the experience,” Morgan adds. “You will.”

What you won’t find in Grounded 2 during its Game Preview is the complete story Obsidian wants to tell, and while Morgan and Parker wouldn’t share any details about what to expect beyond new mysteries and clues for players to discover in Brookhollow, they are adamant that it’s the one piece of this early access puzzle the team is holding close to its chest. It’s also one aspect of Grounded 2 that the community shouldn’t expect to influence much.

“We know how we really want this story to unfold,” Morgan says. “It’s not as much of a community-built feature because having millions of people in a writer’s room probably doesn’t result in a great story, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still engage and play with the community narratively.” Maybe the community’s story thoughts lead to an easter egg or a nod, or maybe Obsidian leans into a theory – it’s the kind of stuff Morgan says players will need to discover for themselves in Brookhollow.

The hottest debate of Grounded 2’s development came in the form of the new Omni-Tool, which morphs together the hammer, axe, shovel, and wrench into a single tool, rather than multiple separate items that each take up space in your inventory. In fact, despite it being in the game, Obsidian is still debating it today and looks forward to learning how the community feels about it.

“A lot of player feedback [in Grounded] would be frustration with inventory management and hot bars and things like this,” Parker tells me. “And I think that’s because you have to carry a chopping thing, a smashing thing, a digging thing, and a repair thing, and when I need those, well, I’ve used half my hot bar. So, removing that completely so that it’s just the Omni-Tool you carry, it addresses a lot of those issues in a way that works very well.

“It’s very much a quality-of-life issue, but it’s one that was hotly debated as to whether it’s an improvement or if it’s us backing away from something that is very survival.”

A new feature that wasn’t a debate, however, was the new Buggies, the in-world name for the insect mounts players can ride in Grounded 2. There are just two Buggies in Grounded 2 at launch – spiders and ants – but Obsidian has plans to add more. However, it originally wanted to include as many as five at the release of Game Preview. Parker says it felt antithetical to putting that many in Grounded 2 at the starting line, though.

“Let’s make two Buggies that are really clear, distinct archetypes and see how the community interacts with them,” he says. “We intentionally stopped building more buggies because we feel very good right now. [These two] feel good as movement options in the world and as part of combat and building.”

Parker admits they are still janky, or buggy, for lack of a better term, but Obsidian knows this, just as they likely know of the other issues or pain points players are experiencing in Grounded 2’s early access. It’s about “putting things into the community’s hands to see what really rises to the top,” I’m told. That’s part of how Obsidian determines what to focus its efforts on in the coming months, and you can expect Buggies, arguably one of the biggest changes to Grounded’s formula, to be near the top of that list as it’s something the team is excited to iterate on.

Of course, there’s plenty of “new” elsewhere in Grounded 2. Combat, whether solo or in a four-player squad, features new mechanics like dodging, and AI advancements for returning bugs like ants, spiders, bees, and ladybugs, as well as newcomers like the scorpion, butterfly, caterpillar, and cockroach, are sure to change up the threats and gameplay flow. In-backyard-universe brands players already love, like Punch-OP and Minotaurs & Myrmidons, return alongside all-new brands, too.

And all of this is just the start of what Obsidian has planned for Grounded 2 as it continues to build it alongside the community for the coming months into next year and beyond.

“The studio is in great spirits and they should be,” Parker says. “I think shipping one title in a year makes for a pretty darn good year. Making games is fun, but shipping games is better, and to ship three games in one year is awesome. It does create a very frenetic sort of pace around the studio, but it’s pretty amazing. You don’t know if you’re going to last one year or three years – you hope to last six or eight, and we’re getting on 22 years now, and in our 22nd year, we have three games. That’s ridiculously awesome. It’s unreal.”

Grounded 2 is now available on Xbox Series X/S via Xbox Game Preview and PC via Steam Early Access.