Executive producer Marcus Morgan takes us behind-the-scenes of the sequel to one of Xbox’s most unique games
One of Xbox’s most unique games is making a grand return.
To learn more about the sequel, MobileSyrup sat down with Marcus Morgan, head of strategy at Obsidian and executive producer on Grounded 2. In his role, he’s responsible for overseeing the developers and making sure they have the tools they need for the game. During our interview, he talked about the process of introducing new Buggy mounts, the collaboration between Obsidian’s many teams, co-developing Grounded 2 with Canada’s own Eidos Montreal and more.
Marcus Morgan: First and foremost, it’s got to be Buggies. All of Grounded 2 was built around mounts and Buggies. It’s one of the main geneses for why we needed to go make Grounded 2. We needed to create this brand-new area that supports mounted gameplay that wasn’t in the original. So Buggies was first and foremost the main feature with how we laid out the area, the design, how we improve combat, how do we adapt different biomes, why we even set it in [Brookhollow Park] — all those things, Buggies are a big component of.
And then the other big piece in terms of making the sequel was we had a story we wanted to tell. We had a continuation of a story from Grounded 1 that we wanted to build on. And being Obsidian, being Eidos Montreal, we are, in our roots, really into story and characters and world-building. And that was such a major component of, “How are we involved in the story? How are we building depth in the four main teens? How are we expanding the mystery of [the central tech company] Ominent? How are we adding in other NPCs throughout the world to flesh this world out?” And so I would say those are the two main ones.
Morgan: Area design in and of itself has to be evolved and changed. What’s the distance between major points of interest? How do you handle dungeon or interior exploration, which are our ant hills? Can you make that work? And do they need to grow, or do they need to shrink, or do you need to expand the height of the ceilings? Things like that all play a role, and that’s pretty apparent and pretty in the forefront of area design. But especially with how we wanted Buggies and mounts to work, we didn’t want them to just be a thing you rode. We wanted them to be really integrated into the entire survival experience. And so it did require us to go touch on every little aspect. When you enter into combat, you might have a Buggy with you. We want the player to be able to fight on the Buggy or off the Buggy, and then, what does that mean for expanding combat? What does that mean for all the different character AI and how that evolved for the Buggy AI versus circular ant AI? Exploration, things like inventory management […]
So it literally was every single piece of the game that Buggies do touch, from exploration to combat to building. With the red soldier ant, in particular, we really wanted that Buggy to feel how you’d imagine an ant would operate in the world. Yeah, it could go chop down grass blades, and it could carry a bunch of stuff. That’s how ants kind of operate. And they also just enhance the way you build in the game. So, each piece that you would think of with regards to the survival loop really did get touched on […]
Even the different distinction between how co-op versus single-player can work with the addition of Buggies changes things. Now, if you play four-player co-op and every player also has a Buggy, it’s like chaos in all the best ways, because Buggies are going down, your teammates are going down. But if you’re playing solo now, you’re not quite as isolated as you would have been before, because you can have this Buggy companion along the ride with you, and you can use it to distract enemies if you need to. You obviously move a little bit faster. So it’s nice to just have that companion.
Morgan: I promise I’ll move off of Buggies after this one. [laughs] But I can’t not say it: the most requested feature from Grounded 1 was Buggies, so that’s why we built a whole game around that. But there were other things as well. One thing people really liked from us was the story. And one of the things that we had delivered in Grounded 1 was it was a little more barebones of a story at initial early access. And what we saw from players was that there were a lot of players who really wanted more from day one. And so as we move to Grounded 2, that’s something that we did a lot more of. We have a full fleshed-out Act 1 of the story to really satisfy a lot of those folks who show up day one and really want to experience the initial story and feel really rewarded for going through and exploring that. That was a big piece.
Another one was we just experimented a lot with different update sizes and cadences. We tried monthly updates. We tried every two months. And we have kind of found a sweet spot of, “Hey, with an early access game, you always have to do patches. You always have to do minor updates.” But the sweet spot for us was, “Hey, let’s expand the time that we do these updates so we can make them a lot more robust, and we can have all the content that satisfies every type of player, whether you like to build, whether you like to fight bosses, whether you like to just explore a little story or world-building elements.” We need enough time to put all that together, and more importantly, we need enough time to actually digest the feedback we just got from the last release to improve and iterate on […]
The other piece of what we build on a lot in Grounded that comes top of mind is we wanted to expand on the depth of combat. I think you can see some players have played thousands of hours, which is mind-blowing to me. It’s wild. But after you kill an orb weaver spider so many times, you’re like, “Oh, how do we make this more interesting? How do we make this more unique?” So that way, if someone did play for that long, when they come play Grounded 2, it doesn’t feel like they’re just doing more of the same thing. And that’s where we got to combat “2.0” where we added a block feature to some of the creatures. We added some feints that some of the creatures will do. We added a dodge for the player ability. So that created a lot more of this “rock-paper-scissors” element of combat that we could just see that the players want this more. They want more depth of combat. How do we expand that? That was a big one that we saw from folks.
Morgan: One of the best parts about being a multi-project studio, and especially when you have so many games that are shipping relatively close to each other, is you do get to share some of those learnings, even if you’re not directly on the same team. And it’s such a benefit to every team that comes after. Before I go too far down that path, though, I also do want to give a big shoutout… A thing that’s really special that helps us a lot is our centralized teams, too. So we have our amazing folks on our comms team, like Shyla [Schofield] and Mikey [Dowling] and Alicia [Kim M.] on the Xbox side. But then we also have our central tool group, which is constantly building on things like our OEI [Obsidian Entertainment Incorporated] tools, which not only impact all of our games, are integrated in all of our games at our studio, including Grounded, including Avowed, including The Outer Worlds 2… But we also share them with other XGS [Xbox Game Studios] studios. Allowing people to build on that stuff, that’s the way games improve and get better. It’s this collaborative “dogpile” of, “Let’s take what worked before. How do we iterate on that and improve it in the future?” So it’s not just about us helping others, but people using our tools and improving it helps us as well. And that’s always really great.
One of the things I like to tell people, too, in terms of the shared stuff that goes back and forth. From Grounded 1, the photo mode that we had, the baseline for that underlying tech, actually served as the baseline for Avowed’s photo mode. And so this happens from time to time again — a lot of times, it’s the bridging of the gap of the teams just talking and collaborating with each other. So it’s super helpful. It’s one of the principles that Justin Britch, our VP of development, and I talk about all the time, which is “building upon past success” and making that a real critical part of our development philosophy. And this is that in action — the sharing that we do across the different teams.
Morgan: There’s a lot of shared DNA, especially on the action-RPG side of things. And they make pretty incredible worlds. They have an awesome pedigree. I love that studio. We admire each other, which makes for a really great collaboration. But the other big part for what motivated the collaboration with Eidos was we knew we wanted to make Grounded 2. We knew we needed some external support to make this happen, and some co-development to actually bring to life what we really wanted for Grounded 2. And as we were looking at different studios, it was like, “Yeah, what is the studio’s pedigree? What have they made? Can we align on stuff?”
But the other most important part was, “Is there a team out there that’s a fan of Grounded?” And there just happened to be an overlap at Eidos where there was the team who liked Grounded. I romanticize this stuff probably far too much, but it was almost like the professional expansion of early access development. They were already kind of part of the community. They already had played the game. They already had the ideas that they wanted to add. And they also happened to work for this incredible studio at Eidos Montreal. And so being able to partner with them has worked extremely, extremely well.
And honestly, lots of people ask, “Well, what number of people are on this side, or who’s in charge of what thing, or what things did people add?” It’s always really hard to parse that out, not because we’re trying to be coy, but mainly because it really does feel like it’s our game. We think about ourselves as the “Grounded team,” not the “Eidos team” or the “Obsidian team.” We are the “Grounded team” collectively, and that approach and that style have led to a pretty successful relationship, and one that I’m super happy to continue to grow, expand and build over time. I talked about building on past success, us sharing just game development in general as we move forward into the future — I think what’s really important for the improvement and the success and the sustainability of games is this collaborative nature. And finding a way to do that and show that to the world successfully with Eidos, it also means a lot for what we signal and how we make games in the industry.
Morgan: [laughs] That’s super funny that you asked that. There is a level of that that we do. We do know it’s like, “Hey, for ’90s Midwest American values, we might have to lean on Obsidian a little bit more in terms of having the subject matter experts versus some of our Quebecois friends.” So yeah, that does happen from time to time. But I also think having that different perspective, having a broader view… Yes, the game is set in ’90s Americana, but people all over the world are playing the game and being able to use that as a cultural touch point but [also] add things that maybe do connect with audiences that are different is important. I’m glad that they’re there to push us.
Even certain things like features. They were big proponents of the Omni-Tool [added in response to feedback to unify the base toolset], which is a different evolution of how Grounded 2 works relative to Grounded 1, and it’s made the game better. We were able to expand and go deeper in other areas, because they push on stuff like that. And they have a different aesthetic and style, too, that has evolved the way that some of the creatures look, and they’re really talented at some of those artistic flairs that are different than some of our sensibilities. So I like it. But yes, there are times that we have to go, “There was no poutine in the Midwest in the ’90s.” [laughs] They never pushed that, though — they do a good job of trying to do the right research.
Morgan: We spent a lot of time focusing on the tutorial section of the game just to really help onboard new players — not only from like a functionality perspective, but also from a story perspective. And so, one of the things that solved two problems for us is that we decided we wanted more story. We wanted a full Act 1, and part of that was that we put in an intro cinematic. And what that intro cinematic does — and it’s awesome and it’s fun, making fun cinematics in games that are relatively short — but it also fills you in. If you are a brand new player, you can get an understanding of what’s going on the world. You get a glimpse at who these characters are. You’re rooted in this 1992 setting and space. And so it makes it much easier for, if you are a new player, to learn what’s happening. Sometimes, survival games, especially back in the day, just drop you off in the middle of nowhere, and you didn’t know what the heck was happening. When you kind of have a sense of your place in the world, it’s easier to be motivated to go out and explore that world […]
And I say this almost every time I can. Having difficulty levels is important and I encourage people all the time that if they just want to enjoy the world and the story, play on “Mild,” which is our easiest mode, because it’s fine. There’s no ego in this. I’d rather you enjoy it and have a good time than post whatever. So having those difficulty levels helps as well.
Grounded 2 launches on Xbox Series X/S and PC in early access on July 29 and will be included with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass at no additional cost.
