Obsidian surprised us by announcing a sequel to shrunken-player backyard survival game Grounded earlier this summer. We assumed that Grounded, released in 2022 after two years in early access, had more years of live development ahead of it, which is often the case for multiplayer survival games like it. But that was never apparently the intention for Grounded.
Executive producer Marcus Morgan told me in an interview that Obsidian always intended Grounded to have a beginning, a middle and an end. “When we began Grounded 1, there was always this idea that there would be a close to Grounded 1,” he said. “Obviously there’s survival games like Ark, which are kind of ever expanding, or Minecraft, which are big platforms that are expanding. But a lot of our touch-points for Grounded 1 came from The Forest or Subnautica. So when we were making Grounded 1, we knew there would be a beginning and a middle and an end to the game, in terms of the story we wanted to tell.”
The unexpected success of Grounded shook these plans a little – “it took off way more than we could have ever imagined,” he said – but an end to the story did eventually come, at which point the studio knew it wanted to do more but also knew it couldn’t realise the ideas within the game’s existing framework.
Mainly, Obsidian wanted to implement mounts, or “buggies” as Obsidian is now calling them – insects like ants that you can ride around on. “The reason we didn’t actually have [mounts] in Grounded 1 was because the world and the space wasn’t designed to actually have mounts,” Morgan explained to me. To enable them, then, Obsidian moved the playing space from a confined backyard to a much larger park, while also taking the new-game opportunity to move to Unreal Engine 5 and implement other feature ideas as well.