Fresh off of the well-received RPG The Outer Worlds, Obsidian revealed its next game at X019. Grounded is a first-person co-op survival game and will come to Xbox One and PC (both via Steam and the Microsoft Store) in spring 2020. And not only will it come to Xbox Game Pass, but it will also be the first Xbox Game Preview title available through the subscription.
And even though Obsidian is known for RPGs like South Park: The Stick of Truth, Fallout New Vegas, and the aforementioned The Outer Worlds, Grounded is going in a bit of a different direction. The survival game shrinks players down to the size of an ant and tasks them with surviving in a suburban backyard. They’ll have to get materials and build bases with the array of everyday items while also looking out for “life-saving resources” and the mysterious hostile forces that lurk around. Of course, there will be some big, peaceful insects, too. This will all take place in a “versatile, handcrafted sandbox structure” and will let players “create their own experience from the ground up.” Essentially, it sounds as though Obsidian wants to reiterate how much freedom its players will have.
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Obsidian also said this game provides a mix of “environmental and narrative driven story telling.” This approach sounds like it thrives off procedural sandbox stories while also having some sort of structured narrative in some ways similar to Subnautica.
While all of this is quite new for the studio, Grounded‘s co-op is also arguably the newest part. Grounded will support solo play as well as four-player co-op where everyone can team up to take on missions. But Rare stated that is a “true passion project” where the team wanted to use this as a “creative outlet to bring their years of developing highly regarded games to bear on the survival genre.” Obsidian also said RPGs will always be in its DNA bu that it wanted to stretch its creative muscles.
