This is the real reason they created Grounded 2: “It’s the number one requested feature we got”

During the Xbox Games Showcase, fans of the company were surprised to see that Obsidian Entertainment still had a project in the works. While the studio has already brought us Avowed, and The Outer Worlds 2 looks promising, they have something else in mind with the upcoming release of Grounded 2. Although the original title didn’t have the necessary noise at the time (remember that it arrived as an early access in 2020), the studio found several reasons to bring back this particular adventure that takes us back to a huge garden... or, well, a normal garden with very small protagonists.

The reasons behind Grounded’s return

This morning, the first Grounded 2 previews started coming out from colleagues who played it at Summer Game Fest. It seems everyone had the same question: What motivated Obsidian to bring Grounded back? The main reason everyone came up with is that the team behind the first title ran out of room to add more features, and switching to Unreal Engine 5 helped the game grow. One of these features was something the community had asked for: riding bugs. The studio has dubbed these bugs “buggies.”

Executive Producer Marcus Morgan spoke to various media about the process. With IGN he mentioned that “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.”

“It’s the number one requested feature we got from Grounded of what people wanted,” Morgan told Digital Trends. “It also is the baseline that generated why we expanded to make a new map, expanded to make a new game, and expanded to make a new world. We didn’t want buggies just to be something that you rode around on. We wanted them, one, fully integrated into the final experience. That’s why you can craft with an ant buggie, you can fight, and you can build with them. We actually prototyped out mounts in Grounded pretty early on, but the world wasn’t designed to fit that in.”

Grounded 2 will be released on July 29 on PC and Xbox Series X|S in early access (Game Preview) format.

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