Xbox Games Showcase Deep Dive | Grounded 2

NARRATOR: Games in this podcast range from E to M.

MALIK PRINCE: Hey, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to the official Xbox Podcast. It's the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox. I'm Malik Prince and we're here to talk to you about a very special game, Grounded 2. We're excited to talk about the adventures that these teams are going to get into. But before we do that, let me introduce to you my very special co-host, dare I say maybe even super-fan of Grounded, Jenn Panattoni. Jenn, how are you doing?

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, you know, living the dream. I'm so excited. I can't even because I'm so excited to talk about this game. So, I'm excited to join you. I'm excited to join both of you. And this is going to be so exciting, so I hope you're all sitting down.

MALIK PRINCE: That's right, that's right. Well, speaking of our guests, we have of course Marcus Morgan who is Executive Producer and Chris Parker who is Game Director. How are you all doing today?

CHRIS PARKER: Doing good.

MARCUS MORGAN: Yeah, great.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, so excited to have you. I just want to ask like we're talking about Grounded 2 just revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase. What does it feel like to be able to say "Grounded 2"? Because I know for so long you've had to keep it under wraps and now the world knows about it.

CHRIS PARKER: It's a pretty big change. It's awesome. You know, one of the most important things, one of the things we're most excited about is getting out there with the community and actually talking about the game. And actually being able to use the title "Grounded 2," it's a really exciting time for us. We're super geeked about it.

JENN PANATTONI: Excellent. Well, okay. So, Marcus, you're the Executive Producer, so tell us about your history with Obsidian and Grounded 2 and just I want to hear everything. Ready, set, go.

MARCUS MORGAN: Well, I've been working with Obsidian for about six years now and at Obsidian for four. The Outer World was the first game I kind of worked on with Obsidian, but Grounded was really, really near and dear to my heart. It's also the first game tattoo I ever got. I got a BURG.L tattoo on my arm after we got five million players.

JENN PANATTONI: Cheese and fries, a BURG.L tattoo?

MARCUS MORGAN: Yeah, absolutely.

JENN PANATTONI: That's amazing.

MARCUS MORGAN: Yeah, yeah. So, Grounded means a heck of a lot to me and I've been working with kind of the original Grounded team and then trying to be the shepherd into the future to help kind of keep making more and more Grounded forever and ever.

MALIK PRINCE: Grounded through and through including your incredibly loud shirt, which --

MARCUS MORGAN: Incredibly loud? I mean --

MALIK PRINCE: Amazing 90s games shirt.

JENN PANATTONI: And tasteful.

MALIK PRINCE: And tasteful.

MARCUS MORGAN: You know, you've got to commit to the bit, you know what I mean?

MALIK PRINCE: That's right. Now, Chris, you're the Game Director for Grounded, but you're also a founder at Obsidian, right?

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah, that's correct. So, yeah, I've been the Game Director for Grounded 2. It's been pretty exciting for me actually because I really, really love the first game. I think my save game is at like 200 hours, you know? So, it was a really exciting opportunity for me to work on this. But yeah, I'm one of the founders of Obsidian. So, I've been there the whole time since 2003 when me and four other guys left Blackout Studios, went out on our own, went to Feargus' attic and started up a company and somehow managed to build it into Obsidian, which is crazy to me because to me it still has sort of like that attic feel where all we're doing is trying to make cool games that we love that we want to play and at a place where we would want to work if we weren't the founders. And it's pretty cool.

MARCUS MORGAN: Thank you for making this place, Chris. I appreciate you.

CHRIS PARKER: You're welcome, Marcus.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, but it's been so incredible. I mean, if we look at the games that Obsidian has put out, we talk about the Outer Worlds, games like Pentiment or Fallout, New Vegas, and Grounded. Like it's a studio that is built with like a passion of making video games, so it's cool for you who's been there the entire time to kind of see that evolution I'm assuming, which is so cool.

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah, it's been great. I mean, I think it is such a crazy and unique opportunity for me personally and professionally in terms of being able to work on a lot of different IPs within primarily the RPG space, which is really one of my favorite genres and always has been one of my favorite genres. And so, I've been able to work on Star Wars IP with Knights of the Old Republic II. I got able to work in the Fallout space, which was actually originally a Black Isle IP, right? But then, I went to Bethesda and then Bethesda let us work on it as Obsidian, which is crazy. I never thought we'd ever get to work on that again. I worked on South Park. Who would have ever thunk that was going to happen? And then, we made our own IP with Pillars and The Outer Worlds 2 and then again with Grounded. I'm probably leaving stuff out here, but like all of these have been like amazing to work on with amazing people actually too. That's the other thing that makes it really cool and really exciting.

JENN PANATTONI: So, as you can all probably tell, just guessing here, I'm obviously a very big fan of Grounded, right? I have put hundreds of hours into it. I have played on weekends with my squad. The screams, I have scramped the tears, I have cried from laughter. I love this game. So, tell me about what's different, what's new, what can I look forward to that I had with Grounded 1, and what can I look forward to that's going to build off of that?

MARCUS MORGAN: More scramps.

CHRIS PARKER: More scramps.

JENN PANATTONI: All the scramps.

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah. So, when we started talking about Grounded 2, I mean the first thing was, "What are all the things about Grounded that we just can't change because the game is so freaking good?" If anything, we're just going to level them up and make them better. And one of the things we did right off the bat was go to all the community feedback that we had from the first game. Number one feature that the community asked for, which was let us ride around on insects, which we call buggies. People always want new biomes and new environments. What are just simple quality of life features that we think we can add into this game? It just brought it all together and started saying, "How do we make this like the best Grounded 2 we possibly could?"

MARCUS MORGAN: I always think about it in the three big buckets of a whole new world and a whole new story with moving from the backyard to a bigger space in the park. So, it's two years later from Grounded 1 and there was an event that is happening at Brook Hollow Park, which is the city where Grounded 1 takes place. Some shenanigans go on, and we find our cast of teens shrunken again and needing to figure out what happened, why it's happening, maybe battle against Ominent or not again and other mysterious figures that might be cruising around in Brook Hollow Park. So, for our game preview launch, it is basically act one. It'll take you quite a bit more time to get through the main story of this one, but there's a lot more to come. We're putting just enough in there so that as we go through early access people can see and understand kind of what we're doing, who the characters are. They can also give us feedback on that. And then again at 1.0, that's when we're really going to come in with thicker deeper story and really add to it and make sure that everything that we're building really works together and that the community digs it too.

JENN PANATTONI: I love hearing almost every time you all mention something that you have put in or you developed, the community comes into play, and I'll talk about that in a second. But because it is me, we're talking about buggies. We're absolutely talking about buggies, and I need to know right now. So, okay, tell us everything. What can you do? What kind of buggies do we have? What can I get excited for? Can I dress them up? I need to know all this right now because I know everyone else will want that information too, but mostly I'm asking for me.

MARCUS MORGAN: The biggest thing that we had in our minds from day one with regards to buggies was they're not just something you ride. They are integrated into the entire survival experience.

CHRIS PARKER: We wanted to focus how you use the buggies, and the first one we developed is the red ant soldier, and this is sort of like a general purpose buggy. So, again, almost everything that you can do on foot you can do while you're riding that red ant soldier. So, you can fight on that soldier. You can cut down your grass and pick up the grass. It actually has a gather mode, so if you go and just like mow the lawn so to speak, then you can just hold down X and it just hoovers everything up for you.

MARCUS MORGAN: I will just say -- sorry to interrupt -- like that is I think a quality of life feature that only like the core fans will get. Like if you ever have to go get all the thistles to go like make your arrows, it can be kind of annoying like having to click and gather every single one. So, when you can just toggle on gather mode and it's just like a vacuum cleaner that sucks them, it feels so much better.

CHRIS PARKER: It's totally true. But also, you can get back to all those verbs. You can place blueprints for construction. You can actually build directly while you're still on top of the buggy. You can eat and drink and manage your inventory. And of course, that red ant soldier has its own inventory. So, if you're full, you can go and like load it up with stuff so you don't have to go back to base to put everything away. And then, critical, you can fight while you're on the buggy, but you don't only fight on the buggy because they also make a really good companion character. So, you can jump off, they will go ahead and attack whatever you're fighting against too. So, you can use them either as your sort of front line or as a tank for you if you want to, which is great to have somebody else kind of with me in the game as a partner and somebody that can help me fight.

MARCUS MORGAN: The other thing I love with using the red soldier ant buggy is you can actually go into anthills with the buggy and then the other ants won't attack you, but it makes it feel kind of like this off-road ATV underground experience that you get from an exploration standpoint as well.

JENN PANATTONI: I love all of this. I love absolutely all of this. But you have left out one very critical crucial feature. Please roll the footage.

MARCUS MORGAN: We have footage.

JENN PANATTONI: We've got footage.

CHRIS PARKER: Oh, yeah.

JENN PANATTONI: You can pet the buggy confirmed.

MARCUS MORGAN: I'm pretty sure this is like the first feature we put in for the buggy. I mean, before anything else, it was like, "Let's make sure you can pet him." And you can see here it's an orb-weaver.

CHRIS PARKER: But I just want to add, the other thing that you can do is of course you can name your buggy.

JENN PANATTONI: Yes!

CHRIS PARKER: You can make a nest for it. You need to fall in love with your buggy. I think that's a great thing, you know?

MARCUS MORGAN: Or you don't need to fall in love with your buggy. Like okay, I personally have some buggies that I named "Sacrificial Lamb," and that buggy is to, you know, be a meat shield so that way I can accomplish whatever I need to accomplish in the game. And then, I have other buggies named "Parker" that I care about very deeply.

JENN PANATTONI: I hear you saying "sacrificial lamb," which I'm a little bit anxious about. Can my buggy die?

CHRIS PARKER: Jenn, the brutality.

JENN PANATTONI: I know, I'm sorry, I just have to ask because I get really attached to these things like real bad.

CHRIS PARKER: So, the answer is yes. But hold on. This is another one of those things where we can't wait to put this out into the community and see what the community says about this. If you're on the easiest setting, mild or medium, then what happens instead is if your buggy goes down and you don't revive your buggy, it goes back to its nest and it has to chill out there for a few hours and recuperate.

JENN PANATTONI: Game hours.

CHRIS PARKER: Yes. If you have it on the hardest difficulty though, then permadeath is a thing if you want that challenge and you want to always have buggies in reserve in case you lose one.

JENN PANATTONI: Wait, can I have a sled team of buggies?

CHRIS PARKER: You can have a number of buggies, yes, at any given time.

JENN PANATTONI: Nice.

CHRIS PARKER: Speaking of, the orb-weaver buggy, so this is much more of like a late game add. You're going to have to play through a lot of the game preview version to actually get this recipe to obtain the necessary materials and then to get this buggy. Your orb-weaver does not help you build a base. What it helps you do is just beat the crap out of all the other insects because it's big and it's bad. It does a ton of damage. Its special attacks are all about webbing up other insects, doing roars to actually stun and terrify other insects. It's a really fun, really fast buggy to run around on.

MARCUS MORGAN: You'll notice there's these spiderweb bridges that like if you try to walk across them, good luck. It'll take you like an hour in game. But if you have your orb-weaver buggy, you'll be able to navigate and get to places that those or orb-weaver buggies can reach. And with the red soldier ant, there's these roots that are kind of spread all throughout the park that they can chomp through those roots so you can kind of get through and find kind of like hidden secrets or little Milk Molars or anything like that. The other thing that we really wanted to make sure we did was have this be a feature that the community sincerely helps us develop over time. We actually thought really early on about having a lot more buggies besides just the soldier ant and the orb-weaver spider for a game preview launch, but we decided to pull that back to first see how everyone plays with them. What do they like? What features are they requesting? How are they using them? Are they doing things we never expected? We wanted to roll out more over time. And so, one, we'll hear what you all want and kind of see like what kind of rises to the top. But two, it'll make the buggies better because we didn't kind of overdo it right out the gate. And so, that was another thing that was I think really important to us to make sure that they were a really, really flushed out feature and they were really expanding the way you played Grounded and not just being a mount.

JENN PANATTONI: I love that.

MALIK PRINCE: It's such thoughtful game design, right?

JENN PANATTONI: A hundred percent.

MALIK PRINCE: Like it's not just tacking on something just because you can. It's like building the world around it. It's great to see that you all are going to take some of their feedback, some of their experiences and kind of build off of that with future buggies.

MARCUS MORGAN: For sure.

JENN PANATTONI: For some reason, I think it would be hilarious right now to see a spider buggy with shoes. That just came to my mind. Not filing official feature request, but saying just, you know, think about it.

CHRIS PARKER: We'll have to talk about the expanded cosmetics for the buggy. That wasn't our main kind of area of focus right out the gate.

MALIK PRINCE: But let's talk a little bit about archetypes in the game. Like you all are taking an interesting philosophy with this obviously not wanting to lean in too much into like kind of class-based systems, but tell us a little bit about the archetypes in Grounded 2.

CHRIS PARKER: We're starting off with four of them. There's like a warrior, a ranger, a mage and a rogue are the basic D&D types. And these aren't classes that you'll select, but there are things in the interface to help the player understand like, "If I want to go do this today maybe with all my friends, I'm going to be the ranger who's going to support them from a distance, I should take this armor, I should take this weapon, I should select these mutations right now." And it will really help guide that player experience in a way that we think will just sort of make playing Grounded easier and more fun.

MARCUS MORGAN: We have 10 completely new armor types in the game, and I'm a big armor fan, and seeing kind of how cool the mage armors look. We have an evolved ladybird armor that just looks like kind of like real sword and board kind of feeling. And just like Halo, you've got to dual wield when you get to the sequel, right? I mean, that's the obvious choice. But go ahead, Chris.

CHRIS PARKER: Yeah, no, that was good. When we looked at the rogue archetype, we were like, "We just have to have dual wielding." So, those are actually orb-weaver fangs she's turned into her dual-wielding dagger type basically. And with the rogue, like you might do a little bit of sneaking, but that's not really what Grounded 2 gameplay is all about. Like with the rogue, what you are is sort of like your glass-jawed heavy damage dealing melee fighters, but we also added in the ability to dash. So, when you're playing a rogue character, you tend to dash in and out of danger. You could also dash in and do like heavy attacks, which are pretty cool. So, there's a lot of new and different options there. We knew that we wanted to go deeper on the mages than we did with Grounded. He's wearing butterfly armor there, which is very nice, very mage-y armor. And so, we did a bunch of work on the staffs and just sort of improving how that felt and how it worked. Why is he celebrating like this?

JENN PANATTONI: I just love the butterflies like majestically in the background as he's like slow-mo celebrating.

MARCUS MORGAN: His destruction of a cockroach, which this is showing off a lot of like really new stuff. It's almost overwhelming trying to get everything.

MALIK PRINCE: -- cockroaches because I feel like I'm not afraid of insects, but there's something about cockroaches that I don't know why you add it to the game. It's bringing up childhood trauma for me.

JENN PANATTONI: This game, this game actually got me over my arachnophobia. I'm not even joking. So, I work with Obsidian and Social Impact a fair amount. And I'm not even joking, there have been days where I will send Mikey a photo of a very juicy spider out in the forest and I'm like, "Look at this spider." And he's just like, "That's really cool, Jenn." Like he's really kind about it. And of course, like we love Mikey to bits and pieces, but it's just I've actually learned from this game too. I've never paid attention to like what a larvae looked like before, and then I never actually like -- I guess maybe I saw them and never really recognized it. And then, Mikey also received a photo of a ladybug larva, and I was like, "Look, you're teaching me things."

MARCUS MORGAN: So, I also hate cockroaches.

MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, oh my god.

MARCUS MORGAN: All I did the entire time we made cockroaches was say, "How do we make them more disgusting and more creepy?" mainly because that is the way that you have to experience them. And I think some secrets with the cockroaches will do. We're going to let people discover those over time. But to Jenn's point, the more you experience and play, you do get more comfortable, and I do think it helps a little bit. Actually, I don't know. I still think I hate cockroaches. I don't think I can deal with that. But it does help you kind of appreciate the bugs a little bit more. And we hope that we make them too in a way that makes them feel fun and interesting, not just gross.

JENN PANATTONI: Let's talk about the community for a second because again as I mentioned previously and as you all have mentioned ad nauseam, there's just so much community involvement. And so, obviously there was a lot for the community involvement in Grounded 2. Talk to me about what that was like. Like how have you leaned in already? Obviously, you talked about the features from Grounded 1. How do you plan on leaning in in future updates and what does that look like for all of you?

MARCUS MORGAN: As we were going through this initially, we were like, "Ah, we're always going to be compared to the completed Grounded 1," but we felt like the risk of putting out the game preview early access thing was so much more worth the reward of what we get and what it evolves to. If you think about where Grounded 1 started to where it is at today, it is like an astronomical difference. It's like mind-blowing, not just all of the players, but all of that came, that progress came from the player feedback that we got. PEEP.R mode, if you're familiar with Grounded, is an example of something that came from the community where you cup your hands together and then you can identify weak points. Certain creatures came from the community like the mantis, which we evolved and actually made a little bit smaller and more present in Grounded 2. Even in game preview and early access, we've actually already been practicing and gathering kind of community and play test feedback throughout the course of development. It's fun to be a part of like where you feel like an insider. You're like, "Oh, I suggested that thing. I made that thing."

MALIK PRINCE: It's so good. I think it's a proven formula, right? Build the base version of your vision for what a Grounded 2 can be, but then utilizing the community and their feedback to really like bring it to life and have them develop alongside. And we've seen things like cosplays and all these community interactions where they really are just falling in love with the world of Grounded.

CHRIS PARKER: Well, I'll jump in real quick and just say the other thing with community and building this game, Grounded 2, was that we knew that we wanted to have a partner in development. And so, it took us a while to figure out who that partner was going to be, but we're pretty excited about working with Eidos who is up in Montreal, Eidos Interactive. And not only do they share a lot of the same sort of like just basic tenants of like game development with us like storytelling and character progression and all that kind of cool stuff, they all really loved Grounded. They were already part of the community. And so, when we went to them and said like, "Hey, we want to make it Grounded 2. It's going to be super, super important that we go into game preview and early access and that we make this game with community." They were on board from the very, very start.

MARCUS MORGAN: Chris and I are a tiny, tiny fraction of the teams that get to bring this to life. And between the internal teams at Obsidian and all of the incredible people at Eidos, like thank you for letting us come and represent the game. The other thing I would just say is, yeah, make sure you wish list it so you can kind of stay up to date and you're ready to go on July 29th when it releases in game preview. And we can't wait to hear your feedback. I hope you share that with us as soon as possible. And I do have one last question in the spirit of feedback.

JENN PANATTONI: Okay.

MARCUS MORGAN: You've seen some stuff about the game and you're a super-fan.

JENN PANATTONI: Yeah, yeah.

MARCUS MORGAN: What do you want?

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, this is a fun question. So, okay, we started with spider shoes.

MARCUS MORGAN: Spider shoes, okay, I got that one. We'll make a note of that one.

JENN PANATTONI: Oh, goodness. I mean, obviously, it's me, so it's going to be related to buggies.

MARCUS MORGAN: Of course.

JENN PANATTONI: So, I hear there's soldier ants and I hear there's orb-weavers. As many as possible. I want to build like a barn. I want them to all hang out. I want them to all be friends. I want, you know, like I'll build myself like a house. Like I had a lakeside manor on the pond in Grounded 1. It was beautiful. But I do want a bigger barn for all my buggies.

MARCUS MORGAN: Okay. So, like Grounded, The Great Frontier.

JENN PANATTONI: A hundred percent. Like that's what I want. Like I want to be -- like add rancher to classes because then that way like I can just like do that all day.

MARCUS MORGAN: I think we can satisfy your --

JENN PANATTONI: Stay tuned.

MARCUS MORGAN: Yeah, yeah.

MALIK PRINCE: And if I can put in one --

MARCUS MORGAN: Yeah. I'm sorry.

MALIK PRINCE: That's okay. I have many, many hours in and we're all going to play 2 together, so I want us to all be able to at one point do some buggy races.

JENN PANATTONI: Yes.

MALIK PRINCE: I would love to race around the park in a buggy. I'm just saying, it could be a nice little spin on a cart racer, you know?

MARCUS MORGAN: We'll make sure the community team notes both of these.

MALIK PRINCE: They'll probably hate that.

MARCUS MORGAN: And we will get on that over the next one to two years.

JENN PANATTONI: Mayhaps.

MALIK PRINCE: All right, Marcus and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and talking about Grounded 2. We're excited when it launches in game preview early access July 29th. Can't wait for it.

JENN PANATTONI: On my calendar already.

MALIK PRINCE: That's right. And for all of you out there, thank you so much for watching our Xbox Showcase deep dive episodes of the official Xbox Podcast. Continues all week, so be sure to check back daily on youtube.com/xbox or wherever you find your podcast. Now, speaking of, we also spoke to the team behind The Outer Worlds 2 for an episode this week, and it really just feels like the year of Obsidian. Like we've had Avowed, we have Grounded 2, we have The Outer Worlds 2. How's it feeling at the studio? I mean, you all are just killing it.

JENN PANATTONI: Crushing it.

MARCUS MORGAN: "Fatigued" I think would be the right answer. No, it's so energizing. It's so great. I mean, the best part of making games is getting people to play them. And so, it's incredible to be able to have all these games and get people to just be able to react and see them and play them and experience them after we've worked on them for so many years. And I think it makes all that hard work worth it, what Chris talked about earlier, how great of people that we have. Like Obsidian is such an amazing place and an amazing place to be around. So, even when we are like kind of working through and getting to the end, like it makes it really easy and it makes it really fun and it's so fun to celebrate with any of your friends.

CHRIS PARKER: It does, it's true. And the one thing that I think is so great is that the internets out there have been like, "I can't believe that Obsidian is releasing two games this year with Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2." Yeah, and it's like, "Oh, by the way, here's Grounded 2."

MARCUS MORGAN: We couldn't wait to mic drop that, like, "We've got one more."

CHRIS PARKER: We've got one more here. So, yeah, really exciting stuff.

MALIK PRINCE: We're all going to jump in, right?

JENN PANATTONI: A hundred percent.

MALIK PRINCE: All four of us?

MARCUS MORGAN: Absolutely.

CHRIS PARKER: Sounds good.

JENN PANATTONI: Don't touch my buggy.

MARCUS MORGAN: Listen, as long as you name your buggy properly, I won't mess with it.

MALIK PRINCE: Well, thank you again. And again, give the studio our regards and our excitement also, communicate our excitement.