Grounded 2 Interview: Community Feedback Drives Underwater Combat Evolution

Early access is never an easy outlet for producing a game, but it’s also one that offers a lot of community-driven feedback. While games come out with so much expectation, early access at least allows the developers to work around their fanbase and pivot when there are elements that are working or not working. For Obsidian, this is their bread and butter, as they worked on the first Grounded game for years in early access, and are doing the exact same for its sequel.

At Summer Game Fest this year, we were able to sit down with Grounded 2’s Senior Producer, Miles Winzeler to talk about the upcoming expansion, Into the Abyss, scheduled for release near the beginning of August.

To start things off, let’s talk about the next big update: Into the Abyss.

So, our next content update, Into the Abyss, is coming out August 11, and that’s sort of what we released in January, Toxic Tangle, which was, we’re adding a whole new area to the park, which is the full world map of the game.

We’re adding quest lines in there, and everything that comes with both of those things. We’re adding new creatures, new weapons, new types of gear, collectible, readable story chunks. And then, of course, a new buggy, which is the rideable mount version of the bug.

How big is the new area compared to what we have right now?

That’s a little tricky when you think about verticality, or in this case, depth, because you’re swimming into the abyss – it makes sense. I think it’s pretty sizable. It’s comparable to January’s update, the Garden, again a little bit of a different shape. Maybe a bit bigger as a footprint, but we see it as that next big piece of the puzzle for the park.

How do the new weapons factor into the overall design of Grounded 2?

The weapons and gear, the armor as well, they bring a lot of character to the game. It’s a survival crafting game, so enemies you kill, you use their parts to make stuff. It’s an opportunity to hit that middle ground between being goofy and funny, and kind of cool, where it’s, what can a shrunken teenager can make out of body parts from a red ant.

That’s kind of where it starts. And we tie it into other stuff as well. One thing we were showing a little bit [at Summer Game Fest] in the demo, for eagle eye players is, the new scorpion armor which looks pretty gnarly, and it’s like the rogue archetype.

What can you tell us about the new enemy designs?

The new area, Into the Abyss, is based on a pond area. There’s underwater swimming and exploration. Naturally, what comes with that is refining our underwater combat from the first game – there’s some new stuff there.

That also means making sure enemies can adapt to that because, going from Grounded 1 to 2, we added a lot of stuff, like enemies being able to block, being able to pull from the same tricks you can. Everything that comes over from 1 to 2 is refitted and reworked that way. And we have plenty of new stuff, as well.

The area surrounding the pond that isn’t submerged, it’s more on-foot combat and lots of creatures come out of that, as well. Basically, we try to keep you guessing with new challenges, not revisiting too many of the same combat archetypes, and finding new ways to make you want to upgrade your gear, learn some new tricks and get some new mutations to make you stronger.

Being one of our favorite parts of the first Grounded, how has it been implementing the pond into the core design of Grounded 2 as a whole?

The pond is pretty central on the map from what’s seen so far. I’m glad you like the pond from Ground 1. It’s a little polarizing; some people didn’t like the underwater parts. I came on the project way after that was already done, and I liked the pond personally.

But at the same time, we’ve listened to how the community felt about swimming and underwater combat, and we’re looking to find some new ways to 2.0 it, make it different and appeal to both sides of that equation.

In general, the pond is quite wide, you’ll be covering a lot of territory on it. You can shortcut through it depending on how you have your bases set up and stuff. If you look at the name, Into the Abyss, we wanted to play a lot with sort of depth and sort of horror elements getting deep underwater. That trailer we had a full diving suit, and that’s going to be an interesting piece to the equation of making it feel different. There’s a lot of nuisance that went into how we wanted to make this different than 1. It still honors what made 1 pond cool.

How has the base building evolved going into the upcoming expansion?

One piece of the update that everyone has been excited about since day one has been the ziplines. Ziplines are coming back and I totally get it. Building those networks is super satisfying.

But we wanted to give you some time to learn how buggies work, and how big the park is. So, we also looked at getting in and out of the garden in more recent updates. The big challenge there was intentionally getting into the garden. Once you’re there and want to backtrack, it was a little tricky.

We’ve been playing around with fast travel in general, and balancing fast travel so there’s multiple viable options. For building itself, though, with Grounded 2, we’ve taken a step not too unlike the creatures, where we’ll bring back pieces and change up the art style or functionality a little bit. We’ll also bring in fully new structures. And so I think for us in general, Into the Abyss update in August, the update goal has been hitting parity with Grounded 1 on building pieces, and we’re quite close, so that everything past that will be brand new.

...we’ve listened to how the community felt about swimming and underwater combat, and we’re looking to find some new ways to 2.0 it...

Still being in Early Access, what's some of the best feedback you’ve received from the community that you wanted to nail in, specifically with Into the Abyss?

One thing we haven’t talked about too much, we have the O.R.C. Wave system that’s in the game, where you have the mysterious stranger that contacts you and sends her legions of mind-controlled insects after you. We’ve been wanting to tweak that for a little while; the community has had mixed thoughts on it. Some players don’t like the constant threat of it, and others are like, I did all the side quest content around the O.R.C. creatures and by completing it you turn that feature off in certain areas.

We’re meeting neither side’s needs nor wants. So, we’re finding ways to fundamentally rework that, to be more reactive and give players so agency at a certain point. Like, once they’ve engaged with this feature, you can now choose how you want to live in your world – maybe a broad way to say it.

We’ve seen the boss designs go from spiders to the King Dozer reptile. How has the boss designs evolved since the game entered Early Access?

The very first update in early access was Hairy and Scary, where we had Axl the tarantula, and that was a massive boss, had a lot of unique mechanics. The lizard was even a little bigger than that. Internally, we’re like, we can’t keep up this arms race forever – just bigger and bigger.

It more comes down to making sure the mechanics are fun. I know a big chunk of our hardcore community in the combat sense loves doing the boss challenges, like going under equipped, so we’re fortunate enough to have a lot of readily available feedback there.

But from a design standpoint, we’ve gotten better. Eidos Montreal, as a co-developer, has been leading the charge on combat and reworking creatures, and that’s been a really fun early win on the project, in my opinion. And we’ve gotten into a better rhythm with getting bosses out of prototype, play testing them, every week, every couple of days, getting notes, etc.

Unlike a lot of the survival mechanics, boss designs can be something you can play over and over again, beat to death, really understand what’s working and what’s not working. We’ve learned a lot from these first two optional bosses, along with the main story bosses, as well, and are excited for the next challenge which will come from what the community is most excited to see as a creature.