Grounded 2 Interview

At Summer Game Fest Play Days, Obsidian Entertainment was present in the Xbox area to give an early look at a new boss and other upcoming content in the survival title Grounded 2. RPGamer was on-site and spoke with Director Chris Parker about the game’s development history and upcoming updates. Grounded 2 is currently available in Early Access for PC and Xbox Series X|S, and will release in Early Access for PlayStation 5 on August 11, 2026, alongside the Into the Abyss expansion.

Jordan McClain (RPGamer): How did co-developing with Eidos-Montréal change the development experience compared to the first game?

Chris Parker: That’s a good question. So, Grounded was a very small team. It was a scrappy team who was trying to prove that Obsidian could make an Early Access survival game because, you know, it’s kind of not what Obsidian is known for. And obviously, they killed it and they built a big community, and the community love the game. It finally comes out at 1.0, it’s awesome. With Grounded 2, we obviously took a different approach. We knew that we wanted the game to be a little bit bigger. We knew that we still wanted it to be in Early Access, but we knew that we were going to have a big challenge sort of outdoing the experience we already created with Grounded.

And so one of the best ways to do that for us was to find an outside partner like, you know, we want to make a huge team inside Obsidian. So, let’s find an outside partner. And we talked to a bunch of people and ultimately, Eidos, you know, sort of shone through the rest as the best choice for us for a couple of different reasons. Number one, the ideas. Because part of talking to those people was, like, “What would you do with a Grounded 2?” Just to kind of see if they’re in the same brain space as us, right? And the small team that they had there all loved Grounded. So, their pitch was, like, super on point. They were totally good with it. And so, they sort of shone through as awesome. And you never know how partnerships are going to go, but it’s been great.

They actually do the majority of the actual heavy lifting and work on the title now. Everything from sort of, like, a lot of the initial design pitches through to narrative to world building, whatever. And we’re, at Obsidian, we’re more like directors and guiders for what’s actually happening with that. And we have a really amazing collaboration that’s only gotten better over the years as we’ve worked together, because initially, it’s kind of like, “Hey, okay, you know… this maybe shouldn’t look quite like this. That’s not really the Grounded art style. Or this, maybe, doesn’t feel like a Grounded gameplay loop. We should change this.” But, you know, over time, as Eidos has both grown and become more and more familiar with the guts of the Grounded franchise and IP, those conversations take place less and less. And, more often, it is just collaboration and us sort of boosting each other and plus one-ing each other in terms of what the content or features or gameplay that we’re bringing into the game.

RPGamer: If any, what were the biggest challenges and benefits of co-development?

CP: Biggest challenges… I mean, I think the biggest challenge was just, sometimes getting on the same page. So, an example of that would maybe be with taming buggies. We had a couple of different ideas on how to tame buggies, and none of them were really working, and none of them really felt very good, and everybody kind of felt that. And ultimately, we just had to go – I guess I’d say, like – Grounded is really built around these survival loops. It’s all about harvesting stuff, and then learning recipes, and then crafting, you know, whatever. Like, this is what hatching a buggy should feel like.

They went away and then they came back and they, again, they sort of plus one’d that by adding in, like, “Yeah, you’re going to go find the insect egg, but it’s going to be huge. You’re going to have to haul it like you’re carrying a football, and you’re not going to be able to do anything else. You’re going to have to run it out of this anthill and get it back to your base. And then, you’re going to have to hatch it, and it’ll love you because you’ve hatched it.” And, like, something that was sort of a difficult problem that we were all sort of struggling with, originally. Eventually, we overcame it and turned it into something that was great. And I think those are the kinds of things where we struggled the most originally.

But, I think that’s also the answer to the question. Because the place where the collaboration has shined the best is when we’ve had hard conversations about either what Obsidian’s ideas are, what their ideas are, how to maybe solve both sets of concerns and figure out solutions that are really good for Grounded, really good for the IP, and make all of us happy at the same time. And when we can do that that, you know, we have a lot of confidence that when we put that out in front of the community, they’re going to think it’s dope. So, yeah.

RPGamer: How has the Early Access journey informed development and continued building on the game? Has there been any particularly helpful player feedback?

CP: So, the community’s huge, and awesome, and super healthy, which we love. And, we read all the feedback, all the stuff on Discord, all of that stuff. And Eric, who you were talking to before – who’s our community manager – he pulls all that stuff together. We have this huge, like… it’s effectively a database of community feedback. Then, we go through and we parse all that stuff. So, some of it is really hot. Like, oh, we did this thing in the update and, you know, it’s breaking the game experience for people. It’s more or less a bug or whatever. Okay. We’ve got to fix that immediately. Let’s patch that out.

And then there’s stuff that’s a little bit more lingering, like when we put bows into the game. We didn’t have the ability to block with bows. And that was a design choice that we came up with. We thought it was better to aim; let’s do this. And the community was having none of it, right? And so, we talked about it – and we did push this one off for a little bit – but we pushed it off because we were having trouble coming up with a good solution. And Justin Vazquez, the Creative Director up at Eidos, came into a meeting one day and says, “I had this epiphany last night about bows. I want to pitch it to you guys. Let me know what you guys think.” And we’re like, “You know what, man…”

And the idea was that, hey, if you’ve already drawn your arrow and you hit the left trigger, then that’ll zoom in. But if you haven’t drawn an arrow and you hit the left trigger, it blocks. And I’m like, it might feel a little weird because it’s kind of doubling up that functionality. But you know what, let’s put it in there. Let’s see if people like it. Let’s try it out. Let’s see what happens. And he’s like, “Cool.” And you know what? It’s been awesome. Like, everybody’s dug it. But it took us a little while to figure out how we’re going to address this community feedback in a way that works. And so, sometimes, it just takes us a little while to get around to.

And then, sometimes, there are things that even go all the way back to Grounded. So, for example – I’m not going to name anything specifically – but certain, like, building features and stuff like that. Where it’s like, yes, we know we want to do this. Where can we fit this into our overall schedule? And so, we have our own roadmap where we’re sort of plugging and playing features into the roadmap just based on how much time we have. Like, where does this fit? Sometimes features have a nice synergy between them. So, it’s like, you know, where would a building feature fit? And so, it gets plugged in a little bit later in the roadmap because it fits there better.

But pretty much everything that the community asks for, either we plan on doing or we go back to them and say, “Yeah, sorry, we’re probably never going to do that.” Or we just kind of say, “Hey, this is in the backlog.” Because a lot of it is actually, like, we totally want to do it. When are we going to find the time to do this? A lot of things that are like that. But we’re having meetings – we have a meeting once a week, every week – where we’re constantly reprocessing the community feedback list, reprioritizing stuff on it, and thankfully checking stuff off that list, too, as we actually get it done or into the next update.

RPGamer: What was the hardest design decision the team had to make during development?

CP: Hardest design decision… that’s a good question. I think the thing that comes up the most – and it’s maybe not the hardest, but it factors into every single thing that we do on Grounded, Grounded 2 – is how do we make scale an important part of whatever it is that we’re doing? Because when you’re shrunk to the size of an ant, ultimately, that scale question is really Grounded’s special sauce, right? We’re taking this effectively mundane thing, like a Coke can or a coaster, and turning it into something huge and insane.

But if we let ourselves forget about that, and we start to say, “Oh, you know, here’s an anthill.” Well, if I’m running around in an anthill, the ants remind me of scale, but the actual anthill itself doesn’t, because it sort of becomes normalized in my head as a player. So how do I bring back that sense of wonder? How do I bring back that continual reminder that you are tiny? You are fragile. This world is horrifying. And do that with every single thing and feature that we create, I think, is one of the biggest challenges. And it’s something that we have to constantly remind ourselves of, like, over and over and over again regardless of what it is that we’re working on.

I’m still in the back of my head trying to think of the hardest design decision. I don’t know if I have one. I think they’re all good debates. Yeah, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head.

RPGamer: How do you go about designing moments to encourage teamwork while also making the game feel right for solo play?

CP: [laughs] So, that is a good question, because it is a constant challenge for us, and you were just playing that King Dozer fight. Like, this is a great example of, okay, we’re going to make this really big boss. Also, it needs to be amazing for single players and it should be fun as a group, where you should feel like teamwork is encouraged between the entire group. Basically, that design is asking for two completely separate designs, right?

Really, we just started with some basic principles about what we want to do as we’re approaching it. So, the first thing is always, “What is the content that we’re trying to develop?” You know, in this case, we knew that we wanted to make a gigantic lizard. The lizard sort of existed for Grounded. It was actually an asset we had started to work on, the community got word of it, but we were never able to finish it. And the community really wanted this lizard to show up in a game eventually. And because the garden update was sort of loosely based around the idea of fairy tales, having a big fire breathing dragon fit in that very, very well, and so we wanted to pull that in.

And so, in some ways, that inspiration answered the initial design questions with, well, we know it’s big, we know it’s a lizard, we know we want to breathe fire. You know, how do we get it to breathe fire? Oh, it really likes the spicy candy in the game – the Hot Chachas – so, it has a big belly full of Hot Chachas that it uses to breathe fire. Then it becomes, like, okay, it would be nice if the environment factored into this more. Okay, well, it’s cold blooded. Can we do something with heating and cooling the room? Okay, that works with it being fire-breathing, like, if you make the room cold, it should sort of debuff it, but if the room’s really hot, then it should be happy.

And so, all of those initial ideas just kind of get thrown at the wall, and then we start the hard part. The hard part is, number one, winnowing down those ideas to the ones that we’re really going to keep. But then also, starting to figure out, okay, how do we make these work for a single player experience and a multiplayer experience? And so, in the King Dozer fight, if you actually look at it, the rate at which pipes break is totally different in single player versus multiplayer. In multiplayer, we almost want the team to say, like, “Okay, you two guys are on pipe repair duties, you’re on tank duty, I’m going to be ranged, and then you know, everybody does their job, and we’ll take this thing out.”

In single player, that experience totally shifts. Every now and then, you’re like, “Dammit, he broke a pipe! I need to go fix that thing. Alright, now I’m going to go in, and I’m now going to tank him. Oh, he’s doing this, I’m going back to range him. Oh, he broke another pipe. Let me go deal with that.” And so, it sort of changes the cadence of the fight, but it makes it so that it works in single player, and it’s still fun, and engaging, and strategic. It just is in a slightly different way than multiplayer. And so, it’s just a challenge and we just have to sort of tackle it in different ways based on whatever that piece of content is.

RPGamer: What part of the Summer Update are you most excited for players to experience, if you can say anything?

CP: Yeah, I can say a lot of things. It’s hard to say one thing. So, we’re coming to PlayStation 5 with Into the Abyss. And I think that’s the most exciting thing for me. Because in Grounded, PlayStation 5 – 4 or 5 – didn’t get to start playing until almost a year after it was done. Maybe more than that, actually. And so, this time, to get it on PlayStation 5, have it in Early Access, be able to welcome those players into the community, and have them participate and all that community stuff you’re already talking about. Giving suggestions, giving feedback, helping guide the process of what it is that we’re actually making – I think that’s the most exciting thing.

But I can’t not discuss the fact that this is a really big and exciting content update for me. I think that we’re doing more innovative stuff in this with content than we’ve done in the previous releases that we’ve been able to do so far. And so, you know, I don’t want to undersell this to all the people that are already out there in Early Access, because this content update is great. You’ve got this whole mountain biome with nooks and crannies and dungeons and different experiences in it. Then you’ve got this entire bayou biome, which is fairly toxic. There’s a gas can that got spilled over there with a lot of crazy stuff going on.

And all of those areas are in support of this big pond experience in the center where you just keep trying to go down, and down, and down, and your goal is to get to the bottom of the pond. But to do that, you wind up getting this amphibious Toe Biter Buggy. And, you know, obviously it can be on land, it can be in the water, and it can also help you like other buggies do. And so, this piece of content to me is super exciting, and I think the most compelling thing that we will have released so far since we came into Early Access. So yeah, I can’t leave without saying that piece.

RPGamer: Is there anything else you want to communicate to readers about Grounded 2?

CP: Well, I will say for all those PlayStation users out there, if you haven’t played Grounded yet, it’s on Plus this month, so you can go play it for free and check it out. Hopefully, you love it. I think Grounded, in my opinion, is one of the most accessible survival games out there. You may look at it and think, like, it looks like maybe it’s a little bit of a kiddie game. It’s not. It’s horrifying in all of its own rights. It is a great survival experience, but it’s accessible. It’s amazing if you’re playing it single player, but it is, we always like to say, even better with friends. That co-op experience is freaking amazing. Yeah, we would love for everybody to get out there and play it, and then, you know what, come join our community. Come start talking about what you think would make Grounded 2 better, because we’ve still got a decent runway here where we’re going to be making changes and improvements to the game, so come help us do it. It’s a good time.

RPGamer would like to thank Obsidian Entertainment and Chris Parker for taking the time to answer our questions, as well as Trilby Beresford, Vivian Vu-Anderson, and Edelman for coordinating and facilitating the interview. Grounded 2 is currently available in Early Access for PC and Xbox Series X|S, and will release in Early Access for PlayStation 5 on August 11, 2026, alongside the Into the Abyss expansion.