A lot of survival-crafting video games get many updates over a few years, and although Obsidian’s Honey-I-Shrunk-The-Crafting-Recreation, Grounded, is one such sport, I additionally did not anticipate a sequel to return out so quickly. Throughout Summer season Recreation Fest 2025, I used to be capable of play half-hour of Grounded 2, each from the opening minutes of the sport and with a save file that threw me into the center of the sport. Afterward, this subject was the primary I introduced up with the studio: Why could not the workforce proceed constructing on Grounded as an alternative of shifting on to a sequel?
“So there are a few totally different causes,” sport director Chris Parker advised me in a roundtable chat. “We did proceed to construct on Grounded. So there have been 4 main updates after Grounded 1.0 launched, after which another assist updates that got here out. However on one hand, there have been some limitations with know-how, as a result of Grounded was supported all the way in which again on the Xbox One, and so our skill to kind of develop on that platform was fairly restricted,” he defined, admitting that it possibly may’ve been solved if the workforce actually wanted it to, however shifting on from the Xbox One let the workforce pursue different new options, too.
“One of many massive issues was that there have been some options, like particularly, buggies, [the game’s new vehicles in Grounded 2,] that we wished to unravel,” Parker mentioned. “With a view to remedy these, we actually wanted to consider how they labored on the earth, and what that world area seemed like. They run sooner, they battle in a different way, they do totally different gathering. We need to ensure that all of these issues work collectively actually, rather well.
“And actually, our Grounded 1 workforce thought of doing buggies. They messed round with them for a short while, however they only discovered that the world area did not actually work. They made this sport the place we ran round. And so for us to actually take this on and do that factor that we knew the group tremendous, tremendous cherished and actually wished, we determined to go from the bottom up.”
Buggies are undoubtedly Grounded 2’s largest characteristic revealed based mostly on what we all know thus far. When the sport launches in Steam Early Entry and Xbox Recreation Preview, two buggies shall be out there to start out: the purple ant and the orb weaver spider buggies, and every of them will include their very own skills. To acquire a buggy, you truly should steal an egg, then hatch it at your base, making a pleasant model of the usually hostile bug.
The purple ant soldier buggy is extra like a “basic goal buggy,” Parker defined. “It could possibly harvest and it will probably place blueprints, and it will probably construct, and it will probably battle with you on it, or as a companion, kind of alongside you. It could possibly haul stuff, it has its personal stock.” The orb weaver, in the meantime, has a extra particular use case. It is “rather more for exploration and preventing, as a result of it is actually, actually good at each of these, and it is sooner. It is simply superior to experience round on a spider, assuming they do not freak you out an excessive amount of, however we do have arachnophobia mode coming again once more,” referring to the oft-praised accessibility characteristic.
Parker mentioned “simply all the things in Grounded 2 is by some means tied to suggestions from the group that we had gathered at one time or one other. Now we have a huge database of issues that the group had requested for on Grounded 1, and once we began Grounded 2, lots of what we began with was, ‘What components of this are issues that we need to dive into and assault? And do we expect we will do [them] nicely and really serve the group by tackling these items?’ So just about all the things is concentrated on that,” he mentioned, revealing that buggies have been the “primary most-requested characteristic,” and so the workforce is worked up to get that to gamers on day one.
Day one, on this case, means the early entry launch, which involves Xbox Collection X|S and PC, together with Recreation Go, on July 29.