About Grounded 2 and all the people helping to make it
Plus: The latest about Microsoft's wide-ranging cuts from its games division
It’s probably a weird time to write about Grounded 2, from Microsoft-owned Obsidian.
But I saw it in June. Got some notes. I actually have notes about a bunch of games I didn’t write about yet from Summer Game Fest. I planned to write about them going into the July 4th holiday break. So, here goes…
Grounded 2 is from Obsidian, as noted. The studio is having quite a year, despite… everything else.
Yesterday, Microsoft slashed scores of jobs, cancelled games and shut down a studio, one they announced in 2018. That’s the same year they bought role-playing game stalwarts Obsidian.
Obsidian nevertheless seems to be a 2025 good-news story: They released the terrific role-playing game Avowed in February, surprise-announced July 29th’s Grounded 2 last month and have sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds 2 slated for October.
Grounded games are survival/crafting adventures in which your character has been shrunk so small ants seem as big as small horses. In Grounded 2, fittingly, you can ride ants and other insects—they call them buggies—to get around a massive park. The map for this sequel, Obsidian says, is triple the size of the old game. You can play through it solo or co-op, as before. There is lots of crafting, also as before, though it’s been streamlined by giving players an all-purpose tool.
The story about why you’ve shrunk again is a mystery for now.
In Los Angeles last month, I battled some bugs in-game and climbed to the top of a picnic table (also in-game). Afterward, I chatted with Obsidian’s vice president of operations Marcus Morgan. In February, I’d seen him give a talk at the DICE Summit about the very good goal of keeping Obsidian around for 100 years.
On the why-now aspect of Grounded 2’s release, sandwiched between two other 2025 Obsidian titles, he said the “game is ready to go, and we're ready to start building it with the community.”
The first Grounded came out five years ago as an early access game (even on Xbox, where they call it “Game Preview,”). The second one will as well, on Xbox Series and on PC.
Early access isn’t a gimmick, Morgan told me.
“We really want to respect and actually use early access to make sure there's a trust that we're listening and responding to it, versus like, you know, doing it like a marketing angle or anything,” he said. The studio wants player feedback and are even holding out on fully creating some planned content as they see what early access players think of what’s initially in there. For example, he said, Obsidian “designed out” more rideable buggies than are in the launch build. “I actually want to see how people use the buggies that are out there, so we can we don't get too anchored in the way we're making buggies,” he said. “This is a community feature,” he added, meaning that he wants the community’s feelings about it to shape its evolving design.
Obsidian has some major help with Grounded 2, not just via community feedback. The game is being co-developed by Eidos Montreal, the venerable studio behind Deus Ex Human Revolution and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
(Eidos, owned by The Embracer Group, is also helping make Xbox’s upcoming Fable game. Another Embracer studio, Crystal Dynamics, had been co-developing Xbox first-person shooter Perfect Dark with The Initiative, before yesterday happened.)
Morgan said Xbox did the studio matchmaking once Obsidian told the organization they were interested in a partner team. Eidos helped flesh out the story, as they’ve co-designed the game.
“Sometimes when you put multiple creative teams together, it can… create kind of clashes,” Morgan said. But this one has “gone surprisingly smoothly.”
“What was really awesome about the introduction with Eidos was they were fans of Grounded as well,” Morgan said. “And so, in this spirit of early access, game preview, community-driven content, it's almost like we got the professional community to be involved in the development of the next game, too.”
Item 2: A couple more…
I played through two locked rooms in the 2026-slated Escape Academy 2 (PC, no consoles announced yet). That was fun and made good use of my Blue Prince-wired brain. The first Escape Academy put players in a university full of rooms players needed to escape as part of their schooling. Development studio Coin Crew is doing that again in the sequel, but with more puzzles in the explorable campus as well. They’ve also made the timer in each escape room optional. I think I’ll keep it on.
Petal Runner is a lovely-looking game from Nano Park Studios, basically a two-developer project with top-down retro graphics, all about delivering virtual pets to people. I was smitten by the color palette and its great use of green and pink. They’re so well-chosen that I wound up in a long chat with one of the developers about optimizing a TV so that the colors are right. I think this game will hit best with people who love old-school Pokémon games. That’s not quite me, but I admired the effort and the look.
(That’s almost it for my Summer Game Fest notebook. I’ve covered a lot. And then some. There are two other games I saw that I want to write up in the future, once I do a little more reporting. Thank you to Game File readers who made the whole SGF trip possible!)
Item 3: More Microsoft fallout
Zenimax Online Studios announced that studio president Matt Firor is leaving after an 18-year run. The “studio will be in great hands,” he wrote. (Yesterday, Bloomberg reported the cancellation of an MMO project at the studio. The outlet elaborated today that it was a looter-shooter that seemed to greatly impress Microsoft boss Phil Spencer when he played it in March
May)Romero Games, the independent studio run by game industry legends Brenda and John Romero, announced that their publisher had ended funding (the publisher, some impacted employees said, was Microsoft). “We hit every milestone on time, every time, consistently received high praise, and easily passed all our internal gates,” Brenda Romero wrote on social media.
Amid the known cancellation of Rare’s long-in-development Everwild, VGC reported the expected departure of Rare veteran Gregg Mayles, whose first game for the studio released in 1990 and who had been brought onto the Everwild project in 2021.
Blizzard laid off workers as it pulled back on continued live development of 2023 mobile game Warcraft Rumble, Aftermath reported.
The Verge reported that a product lead for Xbox Family and child safety was let go.
I heard about cuts in Xbox’s game publishing and PR teams, some of those laid off after long tenures at the company.
Aftermath noted the veteran status of several Microsoft game workers losing their jobs, resurfacing worries over a “brain drain” of game industry knowledge.
Microsoft’s head of communications publicly derided a reported rumor that Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer would step down at the launch of the next Xbox, to be replaced by Xbox president Sarah Bond. Microsoft told The Verge that Spencer isn’t retiring “anytime soon.”
Item 4: In brief…
😮 Department of awkward timing: Microsoft announced today that Helldivers 2 is coming to Xbox consoles on August 26. The popular co-op shooter was created by independent studio Arrowhead and published by PlayStation, for whom it was a massive 2024 hit.
In February 2024, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told me (and Game File readers) that he was impressed with Helldivers 2, but lamented its absence from Xbox: “...when I look at a game like Helldivers 2—and it's a great game, kudos to the team shipping on PC and PlayStation—I'm not exactly sure who it helps in the industry by not being on Xbox. If you try to twist yourself to say, like, somehow that benefited somebody somewhere. But I get it.”
📱 Destiny Rising, the mobile spin-off of Bungie’s first-person shooter, will officially release on August 28, developer/publisher NetEase said today.
Mobile extensions of big PC/console game franchises were announced left and right a few years back, but few have made it to app stores or, if they have, thrived there.
💡 Paste has relaunched and expanded its long-running coverage of video games, now under the banner Endless Mode.
👀 Worth reading: An appreciation of The Outer Worlds’ Parvati, one of gaming’s only canonically asexual characters.
Item 5: The week ahead
Sunday, July 6
The Summer Games Done Quick speedrunning festival begins, running through Sunday, July 13. [Full schedule]
Games being raced through include Shaq Fu, Final Fantasy IX and Blue Prince (in a competitive bingo format)
Tuesday, July 8
Missile Command: Delta (PC, console), a turn-based take on the arcade classic, is released.
Thursday, July 10
EA Sports College Football 26 (PlayStation, Xbox) and Mycopunk (PC) are released.
Friday, July 11
Patapon 1 + 2 Replay (PC, PlayStation, Switch), a remaster of PlayStation’s musical combat series, is released. So is Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4 (PC, console), in a mathematical coincidence.
I'm looking forward to Grounded 2. The first game is one of the best survival games yet made.
(Yesterday, Bloomberg reported the cancellation of an MMO project at the studio. The outlet elaborated today that it was a looter-shooter that seemed to greatly impress Microsoft boss Phil Spencer when he played it in May)
One small correction - I believe it was March not May in Schreier's article