Grounded - Honey, I Shrunk the Kids by Obsidian

It’s definitely in that genre but right now it’s pretty… unique. Several of the other splay more like FPS games with survival elements, large or small, and a few little more like an MMO skin with survival thrown in.

Grounded looks… cute.

The other one that I briefly tried was when The Long Dark was in early access. Just traveling around in the cold, not finding anything for long stretches of time, I just don’t see how they can make it fun to play that part over and over again.

A survival game that is actually in Obsidians wheelhouse is something like Neo Scavenger,

But Grounded is nothing like that. This strikes me as a trend following cash grab based on market research probably involving a lot of excel sheets with pie charts.

I think the game will be brilliant. Mark my words, this game will move consoles.

Yeah, Don’t Starve is about the only survival game I can abide. Well, Subnautica too, I guess, though I played that with the survival bits turned off. Probably not a coincidence that these games were (originally) designed as proper single player experiences, rather than sandboxy things where nebulous multiplayer interactions are supposed to provide the fun.

I wonder what the chances are that Obsidian will ensure the survival zombie trope survives in Grounded by adding cordyceps-infected ants.

“Grounded” was indeed being worked on pre-Microsoft acquisition, by a team of 12 people within the 170+ people who work at Obsidian.

Same as “Bleeding Edge” was being worked on by Ninja Theory pre-acquisition, but then was mothballed to focus entirely on Hellblade, as they didn’t have the resources for multiple projects at the time.

Both studios have multiple teams - in Ninja Theory’s case, the Hellblade team is working on their next narrative-driven thing. In Obsidian’s case, they obviously just shipped The Outer Worlds, and I believe confirmed they had yet another project in the works they haven’t talked about yet.

And in both cases, I’m sure Microsoft was just thrilled to have some early output from both studios nearly ready to go, instead of having to wait 2-3 years.

Personally, I’m just happy these studios get to work on different stuff, and don’t feel like they have to solely pump out what people think they are “known for”.

I think what compounds the issue though is that MS has been lacking in first party exactly what these companies were known for, and then the first things they do for MS are not what MS has been lacking in titles but what MS basically has had well covered and no lack of.

It also feeds into the fear that MS was going to turn these studios into making online service based games.

I thought someone above said they were already working on this title prior to purchase. Maybe they just to do something different once in awhile.

Obsidian is streaming the game:

It’s very pretty, and I’ll totally give it a shot on Game Pass. But I don’t think this is probably going to be up my alley.

I do love the way the grass sways when a bigger insect is headed your way.

Exploring the garden and building up your base and improving your gear seems to be a lot of fun.

This might be a good game to play in VR.

Sure, if MS bothered developing a VR solution for Xbone.

I didn’t realize it’s a console exclusive.

My sister is so, so excited about this game. I don’t get it. We’ll see if it winds up being one of the first EA titles she pushes before release.

Being hunted down by spiders in a hole in the ground seems like the stuff of nightmares to me. I realize the artwork is not going for realism but it’s… still a spider.

Good news.

It isn’t, of course. But I don’t see MS putting a lot of work into a VR mode that can’t be used on their console. Kind of like with the new Flight Simulator, everyone on the planet was like ‘fuck, yeah, this’ll be great in VR’ and their response was basically “oh, yeah, we hadn’t considered that. Hopefully we’ll be able to work in in someday”.

I’m very disappointed in MS for not doing VR for the new generation. I can kind of forgive them for not doing it mid-generation (with/near the X release, since it’s certainly powerful enough), but not doing it for the new one is pretty inexcusable.

I’m glad they’re not doing it. I’d rather they focus on good games rather than more hardware gimmicks. Kinect was enough. Let’s see them do the basic stuff right this time around before they even begin to make a reach for the non-essentials.