Obsidian Entertainment shrunk the kids again this year with the early access launch of Grounded 2, which has touched down around three years after the original Grounded officially launched.
It’s a fairly swift return to the franchise for Obsidian, which continues to be one of Microsoft’s most prolific internal studios. Since being acquired by the Xbox maker in November 2018, the Irvine outfit has released an impressive roster of titles including Pentiment, Avowed, Grounded and The Outer Worlds. A sequel for the latter will be dropping in October.
The studio’s other sophomore effort, Grounded 2, is already available in Xbox Game Preview and Steam Early Access. What pushed Obsidian to revisit the little-becomes-large world of Grounded with so many other irons already in the fire?
Two words: Insect mounts.
During an interview with Game Developer on Gamescom 2025 show floor, Grounded 2 game director Chris Parker and creative director Justin Vazquez from Eidos-Montreal—which is co-developing the sequel alongside Obsidian—suggested the title might not exist if players hadn’t insisted upon bestriding bugs.
“This was the main feature we wanted to bring to the game,” says Vazquez. “It was the number one request from the community and it was the biggest justification as to why we wanted to create a new world in Grounded 2. Even if the team had wanted to do it in the first one, the world wasn’t built to support it.”
Vazquez explains that mounts, appropriately named ‘Buggies’ by the dev team, had to be designed hand-in-hand with the environment itself. “We often say we couldn’t have done Buggies without the park, and we couldn’t have done the park without Buggies,” he adds.
On paper, it might sound like a mechanic that’s fairly easy to implement. But adding mounts to a title like Grounded 2 impacts the experience in a massive way. Parker explains that if you make Buggies too fast, then traversing on foot instantly becomes punishing. But, if they feel too sluggish, you’ll have players questioning why they were included in the first place.
“Once you’ve figured out how fast you want the Buggie to go, then you have to figure how far apart you want the different point of interest in the world” he continues. “Then you have to tune both of these things hand-in-hand at the same time. You have the same sorts of issues with combat. Once you start fighting stuff, you’re balancing for both on-foot combat and Buggie combat.”
For instance, Parker says that Buggie combat had players feeling “invulnerable” during early tests and nobody was dismounting to explore as a result. The development team quickly readjusted, but then found they’d made Buggies too weak. In the playtests that followed, nobody used Buggies at all. “You get into these tug-of-wars with balance that was really quite challenging,” adds Parker.
Early access development is about unearthing “identifiable and actionable problems”
Early access is a blessing and a curse when fighting those battles. Vazquez says the more time you spend in early access, the more feedback you receive. That can be incredibly useful, but as production gathers pace, and more and more systems come online, it can also become overwhelming.
That’s why it’s vital to be intentional when introducing new features to players—even when you’re in the middle of that early access process. “That’s the balance we have to find. When is a feature complete and ready enough that we feel getting it into players hands will be valuable and still feel like a complete experience for them, but isn’t so finished that there isn’t room for the community to give their feedback and put their stamp on it?” Vazquez adds.
“The Buggie is a really good example, because originally we had a ton of ideas about all the different Buggies we wanted to do, but one of the first big questions we asked ourselves was ‘how many do we want to do before we get them into players’ hands?’ The decision was made to do just two as well as possible and hand those over to players so we could get really meaningful feedback that will help influence our future Buggies.”
Parker says separating useful feedback from the cacophony of noise is a “tricky process.” He explains Obsidian has a comms group that helps the Grounded 2 team sort through everything the community is saying. The studio also uses Discord bots to let fans vote on gameplay features and other additions. The development team then gathers once a week to discuss those requests.
“We kind of reprocess [the feedback],” says Parker. “We need to understand, when a player finds something good or difficult or whatever, whether that’s a symptom of another problem. […] By addressing this thing, will we fix that? There’s a lot of philosophical conversation that goes into that.”
For Vazquez, early access is about translating the feelings of players into “identifiable and actionable problems” the development team can address.
How long will it actually take to balance all of those equations is anybody’s guess. Parker explains he’s unsure whether there’s an “optimal” early access timeframe, but says it’s important for people to have dates and goals to shoot for so they can evaluate their progress. He does, however, confirm that he doesn’t want Grounded 2 to still be kicking around in early access in five years time, so expect a full launch before 2030. You heard it here first.
Game Developer attended Gamescom 2025 via the Gamescom Media Ambassador Program, which covered flights and accommodation.