Grounded “Is Not Going Anywhere” As Obsidian Gears Up For Survival Sequel

We reviewed Obsidian’s excellent Grounded back when it released on Switch last year, giving it a 7/10 and remarking that it was really only the game’s performance on the console that held it back from a much better score.

Indeed, Grounded, when it’s running well, is perhaps one of our favourite survival games of the past console generation or two. With this in mind, and given that the game does now perform better if you happen to have a Switch 2 (well, it’s much less blurry, that’s for sure), Switch players may be wondering if it’s going to suddenly disappear, now that the dev has moved onto the final prep phase for Grounded 2 (which sadly is only aiming at xbox and PC, for now).

Thankfully, during an interview (thanks, Eurogamer) the game’s executive producer, Marcus Morgan, has said that, “We actually have this strong passion to ensure our games can stand the test of time and keep updating through history…There’s a strong desire on our side to make sure that our games are preserved,”

He continued, “Now, are we going to be doing content and these story expansions to Grounded 1? No, that’s the continuation of Grounded 2. But even as recently as April we released 1.4.7 to Grounded 1, so there’s a maintenance and a desire that that game will always exist. So we’ll keep that up, it’s not going anywhere if people still want to play Grounded 1 as well.” They did also give us gyro controls in an update last year, so you can’t knock the enthusiasm.

Recently, of course, there’s been a little extra attention on what happens with games when they’ve had their time in the limelight, with groups such as Stop Killing Games drawing attention to the issues faced when games are taken offline.

To this end, Morgan gets a little more detailed:

“One of the things that we did in terms of how we structured Grounded is multiplayer is done through peer-to-peer, which in first blush, feels antiquated versus dedicated servers. But we were able to blend that with shared worlds, and what that does is it allows you, effectively, a cloud save that you can share with your friends. So it gives that experience of being able to have a more dedicated server vibe, but it doesn’t have that same requirement of actually having servers.

And this is no commentary on the Stop Killing Games stuff or anything like that…More to say it does establish (the game) so it can exist into the future a lot easier than if you’re on the other side, where you are more of a server-based game.”

So, while we wait and hope that Grounded gets one last switch drop in the form of a gentle Switch 2 upgrade (you know you want to, Obsidian), us Grounded fans can at least rest assured in the knowledge that the game isn’t just gonna disappear on us. Probably.

Enjoying Grounded on Switch? Played it on Switch 2? Let us know how you’ve been finding the experience!