In the upcoming Obsidian game Grounded 2, a game about a group of teenagers being shrunk down to bug size in a giant park, one of the premier features that’s new in the sequel is the ability to mount a bug like a horsey and ride it around. It’s a feature request the community has been making for a long time, and one that Obsidian has been very keen to honor.
And it’s also one of the main reasons that Obsidian is making Grounded 2 in the first place. Put simply, Grounded 1 couldn’t handle mountable bugs…or really much in the way of new content at all by the time it was finished. Obsidian wanted to make its game about becoming very small…bigger. Much bigger. And a move to Unreal Engine 5 helped make it possible, he says.
“There's a handful of different reasons, but I'll focus in on a few of them,” answers executive producer Marcus Morgan, when asked why Obsidian made a sequel instead of just continually updating Grounded 1. “Thing number one was, we started Grounded 1 on the original Xbox One. And we were running out of room to actually physically get things into the game. And so if we wanted to add any more content, we actually would've had a hard load to expand the game. And that ruined the concept of being really immersed and really being in this continuous space.”
Morgan goes on, pointing out that the team had told a complete story in Grounded 1 – beginning, middle, and end – and wanted to do a separate complete story in sequel form. But finally, there were the bug mounts, or “Buggies” as Obsidian playfully calls them.
“We had already prototyped out making multiple creatures in Grounded 1, the challenge was though we didn't design all of the spaces to match that new style of play. You change the speed of traversal, you have to spread out your distance between [points of interest], how you handle over lands, how you handle interior spaces, how you handle environmental hazards. All that stuff wasn't really thought through, so we needed to build a whole new space to really let those things land, that's why the game's so much bigger.”
Obsidian isn’t making Grounded 2 alone. The team is partnering with the developer behind Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Eidos Montreal, for co-development. It's a partnership which Morgan praises highly for how well the teams have worked together, and describes as co-development “in the truest sense.” He explains that Obsidian initially reached out to Xbox’s central team to ask for help finding a studio partner for Grounded 2, but it was the second-party partnerships group who responded and suggested Obsidian speak with Eidos. Turns out, the studio had a lot of big Grounded fans on board – enough that it was the Eidos team who selected and refined the premise for Grounded 2’s story and antagonists. That was enough to sell Morgan and his colleagues on Eidos as a co-development partner. [And no, Morgan does not think Obsidian and Grounded specifically are standing in the way of a new Deux Ex game.]
Currently, Grounded 2 is planned for early access launch on Xbox and PC – no PlayStation or Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2, even though its predecessor eventually made it onto the former two platforms. That doesn’t mean the door is closed forever, though.
“I will say that I'm so, so happy for Grounded 1 that we were able to go on all those platforms,” Morgan says. “At the end of the day, we have a little tagline of ride together, survive together. This game to me is about playing together with your friends no matter where they play. And so our goal always is to reach as many players as possible. We'll start off with this, we'll see where it goes in the future.”
Morgan really can’t speak in a firm way about any plans for the future of Grounded 2, but he does suggest the thought from Obsidian is to do something similar to what was done for Grounded 1: a couple of years of early access, then a 1.0 release. And then, who knows? But he adds that the team doesn’t “put any hard and fast constraints on that because there is a very sincere commitment to the early access process of putting content out there, seeing how people react to it, iterating on that and building from it.”
“And so, what I would say is I definitely see Grounded 2 as being, it's set up to be much more expandable than maybe we had initially laid out Grounded 1 for, but we need to see how it goes in terms of whether or not we put a cap on or not,” he continues. “In terms of what we do for future content and beyond, that'll really be dictated by what players do and then assuming if backend and tech can still hold and keep us in the future, but we would stick with that too. But we'll play that out as we work with the community through it.”
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
