Obsidian Entertainment and Eidos Montreal recently launched their sequel to 2020’s Grounded in early access on PC and in game preview on Xbox Series X. Grounded 2 picks up shortly after the events of the original game, giving players a bigger play space in which to survive and a variety of bugs — or, buggies — to ride.
Grounded 2 is also a change in how Obsidian works; the studio tapped Eidos, known for its work on the modern Deus Ex games and the under-appreciated Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, to develop the sequel. (Eidos Montreal is also pitching in on next year’s Fable reboot.)
With Grounded 2 in early access, Polygon spoke with Chris Parker, game director at Obsidian Entertainment, and Justin Vazquez, creative director at Eidos Montreal, about how the teams are working together, how they’re handling the updates this time, and what influenced the sequel — beyond Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, of course.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: What was the division of labor like this time for Grounded 2 on the Obsidian side, and how did Eidos Montreal contribute?
Chris Parker: The majority of the heavy lifting is done in Eidos Montreal. We have a core group of people here [at Obsidian], primarily the folks that worked on Grounded, of course. And then there’s folks like me, acting as game director, who are working day in and day out with Eidos.
The artists and designers and engineers, the vast majority are at Eidos Montreal.
Justin Vazquez: As Chris said, this is very much an interdependent collaboration. You know, Grounded is Obsidian’s IP. It’s their baby, and we are here to work with them to help grow the franchise together. The point isn’t for us to grab it and just run wild with it, so we collaborate on everything on the highest level of ideas and the lowest level.
There isn’t anything that isn’t being touched by both studios to ensure that we are delivering the best experience for our players on Grounded 2.
Chris: Justin and I’ve been working together for well over two years now on this. And I remember talking to him and Audrey [Goyette], who’s the senior producer on the title up there. I was like, Well, I’m going to want to come and visit you guys all the time. And I want you guys to come down and visit us and I want to set up all these meetings. And there was this immediate joy in their faces.
Justin: For us, it’s about having shared internal values and motivations that everyone at Eidos knows. Everyone at Obsidian just wants to make the best game possible and everybody [at Eidos] just wants to make the best game possible.
So when we come from that place, it creates a sense of trust and emotional and psychological safety where we can be open and vulnerable and have fun and tough discussions to make sure that it’s always making the game better. And it is, it always is.
I remember when we first started talking with the team at Obsidian, I sat down with Adam Brennecke, the game director on Grounded 1 and just asked him flat out, “What did you want to do with Grounded 2? What did you want to see? Where did you want this to go? Because whatever we do, we want you to see that reflected in this.” A lot of the core ideas that are in the game now that are pillars in the game came from those first discussions. And so it’s been that way since day one, like Chris said.
Why a sequel? We’re in a phase of games where a lot of things are forever games, and they get updated indefinitely. But this is a very clear, distinct sequel.
Chris: There are a lot of facets to that question about making a sequel. I’m just going to throw a bunch of stuff out because there’s several things that all came together to make that decision. On the one hand, we did internally feel pretty hampered by the Xbox One console which we originally developed for. So there were technological limitations there that felt very confining. And if we wanted to expand the world of Grounded, we were going to have to introduce things like hard loads and stuff like that. And that’s not really ideal for your sandbox game, right?
But then also, and this is maybe just the way Obsidian thinks, which is great because I think it worked with Eidos Montreal, is that we think of games as stories. They have a beginning, they have a middle, they have an end — and the Grounded story has been told.
It was: Teens get shrunk. They get stuck in the park. They survive. They figure out how to eventually embiggen themselves and go home. That story was told. Adding more stuff into that world for us was not nearly as exciting as moving the world forward with a new story.
So sort of from the start, as soon as we started just kind of talking about how we want to move this forward — and this was like right after the 1.0 release, you know, end of 2022, early 2023 — it was pretty apparent from the very beginning: Let’s go make a sequel product.
Justin: There are those two sides, the technological and the creative, but even those intertwine. Chris mentioned there were technological limitations with the Xbox One. Well, that meant that there are certain features that the community wanted that we wanted to bring to life that just couldn’t be done properly in Grounded; the biggest being the buggies and park.
We say a lot of times that the park couldn’t exist without the buggies, and the buggies couldn’t exist without the park. And for us to do both of those properly, we had to make the technological leap, and we had to build a world from the ground up that supported those things.
For us, we saw it as an opportunity as, yes, Grounded was this amazing thing and the team did so much with it, you know, not just up to 1.0, but all the way to 1.4, constantly releasing amazing features and updates. And I think they left everything on the table for that game.
As Chris mentioned, on the more creative narrative side, this is where the shared DNA between Obsidian and Eidos Montreal really shines, because a big reason we were such big Grounded fans was we saw what no other survival games were doing or they were doing better than other survival games. And the two big differentiating factors for us were the RPG mechanics, which again, shared DNA.
When you look at Deus Ex and Guardians of the Galaxy, that’s a big part of us. On narrative again, [there’s a] big a lot of overlap between the studios, not just in terms of the love of narrative, but how we approach narrative choice and consequences, what matters.
For us, it just felt like the right thing to grow the franchise that you told this amazing story in, Grounded 1 with these amazing characters that went through this amazing and and and horrendous and horrifying ordeal — that traumatic ordeal — what does that mean when you go ahead a few years later? I think of really great sequels, like the latest Halloween, where it takes a look at what would happen to a person like Jamie Lee Curtis’ character who’s been through that trauma. What would she be like years later? Well, we get to tell that kind of story in a video game where these teens have been through something very tough and now two years later, they have to go through something similar again. And what does that mean for them?
You know, how can they transmute that post-traumatic stress into growth, not just on a narrative level, but on a mechanical level? How can the mechanics of the games tell that story? That felt like an opportunity that we didn’t want to pass up. When we started talking to Obsidian about this, we saw that, OK, this is exactly what they want to do as well. And so that synergy was just so good.
Talking about trauma in a game story, and when I think of the Grounded games, I kind of think of them as somewhat kid-friendly. Obviously, a lot of adults are playing Grounded with each other, but a lot of people who play Grounded, they play it with their children or with their younger siblings. So how did you approach the kid-friendliness aspect of this world?
Chris: We want parents to feel comfortable playing Grounded with their kids, but at the same time, Grounded, I guess in our opinion, was not really a game for kids per se, right? It’s pretty terrifying when you’re running around in the world and an Orb Weaver jumps out at you the first time. But [Grounded creative director] Mitch [Loidolt] has always said, [it’s] a ton of fun with a teaspoon of terror.
For us, you know, when we say we want to tell a story, like we wanted to advance it a couple of years. We wanted the teens to be a little bit older and a little bit more mature. If you were a 12-year-old playing Grounded, you’re roughly 17 in real life now. So aging those things up felt reasonably appropriate to us. Of course, we want to maintain the humor. We want the quirkiness and the charming joy of running around in Grounded.
Hopefully that is never lost and never lost on anybody, because I think that’s what makes the world so cool and so exciting. But at the same time, horror and trauma and these other things can be these undercurrents that we can play with, that we can use. They don’t need to be in your face. And we don’t need people to be playing the game, crying about the horrible story we’re telling. But we can use those things, those real things that happen. Well, nobody gets shrunk, but real things that happen to real people and real emotions to tell a better story.
Justin: I’m so glad you brought up the spoonful of terror line because that was something that was super important to [Grounded game director] Adam Brennecke and Mitch when they were first imparting on us their wisdom about the IP. That balance is super important to Grounded. It’s what makes it unique is that it is this very colorful, bright, nostalgic world that is very inviting, very acceptable, especially for a survival game. But then, yeah, you get in there and the world is scary, especially at night when you got Orb Weavers and wolf spiders and now scorpions coming after you.
Chris: You could think of a lot of examples in film and television, like Stranger Things, how the kids start off very young and over the years they’ve gotten older. People who started watching that when they were young can identify and grow up with these kids. Well, we had a chance to do that in a video game franchise and one that means so much to so many people that again.
That’s why in the earliest discussions, it was no question of if we’re making a sequel, it’s got to be our four teens again. We’ve got to bring them back. We’ve got to age them up. We’ve got to see where they’ve gone, how they’ve grown, what they’re like now because that’s too rich of narrative soil for us to pass up on.
The conversations then were all about How much do we age them up? It was never really Are they gone or whatever. It was more, how far do we want to push this, what makes sense, and what have their experiences been like between here and there?
Justin: Grounded is set in such a great untapped golden era for nostalgia. The first one was set in 1990. And when we started having those initial discussions, like Chris said, we were like, Oh, it’s been X many years. Maybe they’re in their 20s — and we’re realizing, We’re skipping over all the good stuff of the ’90s.
Why would we want to do that? We have this opportunity to slow down, totally build our way through that period. So we’ve settled on two years and we’re in 1992. What a great year, for so many reasons.
The “teaspoon of terror” thing makes me think of stuff like Time Bandits and The NeverEnding Story or older Disney animation. And Honey, I Shrunk the Kids gets thrown around a lot as shorthand for describing the Grounded world. But I’m curious what games were important to you? How did you get into this business, and what have you bonded over that’s informing Grounded 2?
Justin: You’re absolutely right about Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. That’s a core inspiration, but Grounded evolved to cover, not just that specific fantasy, but to have tones of early Disney and that mix of scary and delightful that later picked up by Laika Studios with Coraline and pictures like that.
When we started looking at the franchise deeply and started talking about it with Obsidian, something that we sort of homed in on was this very Paul Verhoeven-esque [mode] that ties into Grounded, not just in terms of tone. I think of Ominent a lot like OCP from the RoboCop series, where they’re just this megalithic corporation that isn’t going anywhere. Even if you vanquish the one bad guy that was causing trouble. Well, guess what? In the sequel, OCP is still doing fine. And that for us was really important as to, you know, we have to bring Ominent back. We have to continue this brand tradition of having this omnipresent corporation that’s like a hydra: Cut off one head, it’ll grow back another. That was a big part of the inspiration of one of our new characters, Sloan Beaumont.
We talked about a lot at the beginning was the Alien franchise, about how the first one directed by Ridley Scott created this universe, did all the world building, and did so much heavy lifting so that James Cameron in the second one could come and really go all out with it and have a lot of fun and do something different. But be clearly the next right step for the franchise. That was very inspirational for us.
We’re like, how can Grounded 2 be our Aliens to Grounded [and] Alien? That’s where a lot of the discussions of the buggies, the parks, like a really massive world, going deeper with all of the Ominent lore, really fleshing out this world and seeing where it’s been.
Chris: A couple movies that come up over and over again when we’re talking about Grounded that are not Honey I Shrunk the Kids, are Goonies and Gremlins, and both of those I think are like you have the sort of young adult/kid protagonists in a world that’s frankly a little bit horrific — and adventures ensue. And that sort of joyous union of terrifying and yet entertaining is something that we’re always looking at.
Justin: The last one I’ll give is: Like I mentioned before, a big thing that set Grounded apart and that was so attractive to Eidos Montreal was the RPG aspects. I know that there are a lot of open-world games that influenced Obsidian’s design when it came to Grounded. But a lot of the common love for series like The Elder Scrolls or Fallout came through in Adam [Brennecke] and the original Grounded team’s designs.
Chris: I will say we really did want to figure out how to… I don’t want to be critical of Grounded because Grounded is great, but the way that it’s revealed through little bits of secrets and the things that you actually find in the world makes it a very engaging story, until you get to the end. Then you actually get like some more NPCS and stuff like that you get to interact with and it becomes much more vibrant.
When we went into Grounded 2, we were like, OK, I think we can do better at this for the whole [game], have a more engaging story. I know I’m a little bit off-topic, but I swear I’m coming back around to it.
When you look at the early access game preview version [of Grounded 2], we wanted that very first thing that we put out to tell an entire story, and then add to that story later on, even though it’s kind of a bare-bones story. We want to add a lot of the depth and stuff like that later at one point to really explain what’s going on. We wanted that to be a whole experience.
Pretty much every Eidos game that I’ve played that I really loved has a strong narrative, like Guardians of the Galaxy, Deus Ex, the Tomb Raider games, they put together all of those very rich worlds. Those are the kinds of things that I think when we get together and we’re jamming on all of those little bits — [like] how do we make this section of the game branch more, you know, like this [other] game did? How do we give you more options at the end of the game? Because we did that in Grounded — can we do that some more? And does that make sense? How can we give the players some more agency?
You both keep talking about the other studio’s games. What were your impressions of each other before going into this collaborative project, what you think you might have learned from each other, and what might have surprised you about working with the other team?
Chris: So this is probably a little too self-deprecating, but because I’ve worked on great titles… I mean, my first big titles were Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2 back at Black Isle Studios. And then, you know, Alpha Protocol and Knights of the Old Republic 2, South Park Stick of Truth. Really, really great games. I cannot be at all sad about the stuff that I’ve been blessed to work on.
But Eidos Montreal, when we first started talking to them I was like, They’re kind of a AAA studio. We haven’t really made games that are quite as high of a level of quality as theirs are because ours are always so jammed with content and there’s so much stuff in it that none of it gets all the way up to this super AAA level.
I had also just recently finished Guardians of the Galaxy. I’m pretty sure I’d finished it like three months before we started talking to [Eidos]. And that game made me so happy. Our comms director, Mikey Dowling, was like, “Chris, you should really play that.” Mikey and I have a very similar love of games. I got it and, three weeks later I was like, Why was I not playing this before? It’s great. But again, the quality level, it’s super, super high — a lot of cool cutscenes, you know, amazing production value.
I thought, These guys, having not talked to them, are gonna want to do this production piece and we’re gonna want to do content and quality. Their story and character progression is always great. Maybe they’re just too good for us. [laughs]
But then we got their pitch and we were like, You know what? They get it. These guys love Grounded. This could be perfect.
Justin: First of all, there are a lot of people on our team that are influenced by the games that Chris has worked on, like Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2!
Chris: Quick, quick interjection: I’m up at Eidos Montreal, one of the early trips, and I’m basically having dinner with a bunch of Eidos folks. Yvan [Isnard], who is the UI director, [says Chris] worked on Baldur’s Gate. And then he’s like lifts up his arm and he’s got this gigantic Baldur’s Gate 2 tattoo on his arm and I’m like, What? That’s crazy. He’d had that since, you know, whatever, he was a youngin’ and I’m like, Get out of here. I apologize for interrupting, Justin.
Justin: No, that’s proof of what I’m saying!
So yes, absolutely: Eidos Montreal, known for AAA, known for that level of polish, known for that level of quality. But part of how this came together is that there were a lot of us at Eidos Montreal who were like, Hey, we love these kinds of games, but we’d like to try to make something different. We are inspired by different kinds of games, different kinds of models. Eidos has always been about pushing boundaries and taking risks and trying new things.
So we put this team together of like-minded developers who were interested in not just making games a different way, but specifically, you know, the way that Obsidian approached Grounded. We had very early discussions with Microsoft about our ambitions. And I remember — and I’m not making this up — sitting the team down and going, We need to walk in there and show them an example of the high standards of what this model we’re talking about looks like. You know, we’re building open worlds in early access live over time where we focus on narrative and quality, but from a different standpoint, etcetera.
The best example was Grounded, because, like Chris said, we were already fans. We told everybody on the team, “Hey, when we talk to Microsoft, our catchphrase here is ‘We want to be like Grounded when we grow up.’”
So I was not surprised when the opportunity came up that we were put in front of Obsidian because we had made [known] our love for not just the game, but how this game was made. The approach to the community focus on early access and using that to improve your game with your community to us was something that was just too exciting and that we wanted to be a part of.
People in the Grounded subreddit have praised how different Grounded was at early access launch compared to the final product — I’m wondering how you’re approaching that this time with all of that behind you?
Chris: Already at the time [of Grounded’s release], the quality level of early access games had continued to go up and up and up. And it has continued to do so since then.
You know, games like Enshrouded or Hades 2 come out and we think, Gosh darn it, knock it off. What are you guys doing? Your game is basically done. You’re raising the bar too high for us! With all due respect to those games, of course. But we knew that we wanted again, to have story elements and from the very beginning, we knew that we wanted to maybe tell an entire act of the story.
We wanted to support at least the majority of the features that were going to be present in Grounded.
So it’s almost like we wanted to go into early access with almost a finished Grounded 1, right? Maybe not completely at that level but enough that it would be satisfying for the Grounded 1 players that we’re asking: Hey, you love your community. You’re already playing Grounded. You’re still there, you’re still building stuff. There’s still like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people each month that are, you know, in there playing Grounded doing stuff.
We’re going to ask them to move over and play some Grounded 2 instead. That experience has to be really, really good. I don’t know exactly how that was for Justin and his team, because I know again, right out the gate, the bar was set really high for us on this one.
Justin: I definitely remember those conversations when we were narrowing in on what the scope of our initial offering would look like. The challenge here is not necessarily one of ambition. If it were up to us, we would want to do everything and complete the whole game and put in. But that takes away the value of the early access period.
So it becomes more a question of finding that internal balance that requires us to put our egos aside and say, OK, we don’t want to put out so little of the game in the experience that it doesn’t feel, like Chris said, like it’s measuring up for players — not only by standards of what early access launches look like these days, but also to all of those returning Grounded players to cross the moat and feel good about the making the leap into Grounded 2.
And not just seeing it and thinking, Yeah, it’s a little bit better, but I’m going to go back to Grounded and wait until it builds out more. We want them to feel really conflicted and spend all their time playing both of them.
But also, we don’t want to wait so long that we build the whole game and realize all of the features to the level that we think they should be at, because then we’re losing that valuable input from the community. So it’s finding that right balance of just enough that players understand this is a new and different experience. Just enough that we’re hitting players’ expectations of quality, not just in terms of early access releases, but in terms of a Grounded 2. And just enough that we still surprise and delight them in some ways and get them excited about what’s going to come, but our intent is always to invite their feedback because we do really want to build this game with the community together.
I don’t want to go on a big diatribe, but video games are such a unique medium. They’re not like other storytelling, linear forms of media where once the product is out, it’s done. People consume it, and they talk about it, and they have their impressions of it. They have their thoughts about it. But you can see [what I mean] in how people talk about movies: Oh, that movie was great when that scene happened. Oh, this book was awesome because I love the ending. When people play and talk about video games, it sounds different. We say, I did this. I jacked a car and went on a crime spree in [Grand Theft Auto]. I became a wizard and conquered the wizard guilds in The Elder Scrolls. I made a Wolverine build in Fallout and went through the wasteland as Logan.
We tell these stories as if we’re the ones doing it because the players are the last ones to put their stamp on the creative thing that is the game.
So the early access period and that feedback loop feels like the natural extension of that — that the last people to put their creative stamp on this aren’t necessarily the developers, it’s the community, it’s the audience, it’s the players who have this game in their hands. That’s what made Grounded 1 magical.
We wanted to double down on that in Grounded 2. And so we think we have the right balance here. We’re really proud of it. Everyone at Eidos is really proud of the experience we’re giving because it is a complete experience. It will feel satisfying to players to come in. There’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, like Chris said. And, it gives just enough of the mechanics and the world and the narrative to satisfy but also show promise. And now we’re excited for the next phase, which is: Let’s build this game out with our community, the people who love this game the most.
Chris: Yeah, I feel good about it. It’s always interesting how things work between two companies at any given time, right? Because confidence and faith will go up and then it’ll sort of deteriorate and it’ll go up and it’ll go down. I’m always in there with my pom poms being a cheerleader going like, No, this is really good!
The way that we set up development with Eidos was that sort of every three or four months we’d do a really big build, which we would call an internal release, and we would have everything come together again. Those would be the things that would make everybody at both studios go, like, I see how this game is working. I understand this thing now. Finally, we got we have the red ant soldier running around doing this thing and it feels really good when we do all the stuff. OK, now let’s go build this next big chunk.
What’s funny, and the reason why I bring all this up is that when we were talking about when to go into early access, it was like, what is sort of the minimum number of things where we have an experience but we also have enough stuff to put in front of people.
For example, how many buggies are we going to have? And at one point it was, Let’s have all the insects! You can ride all of them! You can tame all of them! But then we’re like, I don’t know if we’re really going to get any good feedback off of that.
Instead, let’s go do the red ant soldier and let’s do the Orb Weaver.
[Red ants are] like little utility machines. Orb Weaver is a murder machine. So it’s gonna do murder. And you know what? Those are the two ends of the spectrum. And that’s sort of our perfect test case. These are the ones that we’re going to put out there because that’s sort of the minimum.
So then we can see: What do people glom on with the red ant? What do they glom onto with the Orb Weaver? Or what do they hate, frankly? And what do we need to add or what we need to figure out? If we had 20 insects that would be much more difficult to parse all that information and figure out what they were really thinking about everything.
But yeah, all of that was how we figured out what, what bar we wanted to be at, how the two studios could work together and how we would also make sure that we were measuring our progress along the way.
Justin: To me, that goes back to the dynamic between the studios, that deep, rich interdependence between the studios and that deep respect for our motivations, understanding that when we’re talking about these things, when we’re pushing for things that we believe in, it’s because we want the best game for the franchise and for our players.
Because Chris is right, those were back-and-forth negotiations, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what would stick, and then finding the thing, the principle behind those discussions that matters.
And I remember, you know, it was when you guys came back and said, we would rather do, you know, a few [things] really, really well, and get that into the hands of players as soon as possible and get that feedback. [Otherwise] we wouldn’t be able to parse it so that the feedback becomes as meaningful and as actionable as possible.
That’s when it became clear and we all aligned. We’re like, Yep, this is where we’re going. Because that feels like the right thing for the game, for the community.
Chris, you’ve been working in games long enough where you have shipped a gold master and it’s pretty much done — so how do you kind of set yourself up for success for early access? And Justin, what your experience with early-access development is like and how are you preparing for this?
Justin: This is not my first early access experience, nor [is it for] a lot of team members on our team. But it is for Eidos Montreal. I shipped early access titles when I was at Warner Bros. Games Montreal and then at an indie studio called Elastic Games. So I’ve been in those trenches before and it is very different. And I, I want to hear what Chris has to say about this.
But to me, the main difference — and I use these words a lot, so Chris is probably going to roll his eyes a little bit — to me, the main difference is you have to train your brain to focus on the process and not the outcome.
When you’re building these big AAA games that have six-year developments, you’re always focused on the outcome of, like, we have this one big product and it’s going to launch at this day and this is what it has to look like. And you get really tethered to that.
Whereas with early access, this is a build, there’s going to be more, [so] we can’t crunch and burn ourselves out to deliver this thing, because, guess what? There’s another build coming right behind it and another one after that, another one after that.
So you really have to focus more on the process of game making and making builds and doing it in a sustainable fashion that extracts the most value from it.
That shift in mindset, which then influences the processes of how you make games, to me is the biggest difference between being on those boxed AAA productions, and the live-game productions.
Chris: The thing and, and you touched on it right there, Justin, which is great. And we say this a lot, that early access is not the end. It’s the beginning, right?
Justin: It’s not the finish line, it’s the starting line.
Chris: Which is completely different from your sort of traditional boxed product where you have it, like you said, you’re done. Maybe you’re going to do a day-one patch, a week-one patch, a one-month patch, and a two-month patch because you know that you’re going to update some stuff.
But yeah, back in the day when you were working on a Black Isle Studios game, you’re putting that thing on a CD. And then if you put out a patch, you really don’t know how many of your consumers are actually ever even going to get that patch. It’s up on a website here and it’s up on some websites there. But are they going to go download your 1 MB patch that fixes 200 issues or something like that. You don’t know if they’re going to. So you had to try to be much more diligent about making sure that what went into that box was complete and finished.
As for which is scarier, when you’re making something and you’re putting it in somebody else’s hands and you’re saying, I want you to enjoy this, I want you to consume this and love this. That is never not scary. I feel that way about preparing a meal for somebody, right? It’s the same thing. I want to put this in front of you and I want you to love it. It’s the same thing with making a game.
I think with the boxed product, it’s a little bit more of a Gosh, I really hope that this is everything that we want it to be. You have a little bit more latitude with early access, but let’s be honest: If you don’t land well enough, then your player base is gonna fall off and maybe you never even get to finish your thing. There are a zillion dead early access games out there and you don’t wanna be one of those either. Making games is fun and it’s scary and it’s a challenge.
I don’t know that one is scarier than the other, but anytime you’re lining up to spend a gojillion dollars over the next two to five years and then at the end, all you really want is for people to love it. Yeah, that’s scary. It’s scary in a good way. It’s a fantastic challenge.
Grounded 2 is now out in early access for PC and Xbox.
