Obsidian continues to prove why it’s one of Xbox’s greatest studios

I’ve long said that of the many game developers that Xbox has acquired over the years, Obsidian Entertainment is perhaps the finest.

Since 2019, it has launched multiple new IPs, including The Outer Worlds, Grounded and Pentiment, as well as this year’s Avowed, a radically different take on its Pillars of Eternity series. That kind of output is uncommon in the gaming industry, and the fact that all of those games were well-received makes it all the more impressive.

Naturally, then, the ever-prolific Californian developer is following all of that up with not one but two more games this year: Grounded 2 and The Outer Worlds 2. Following the Xbox Games Showcase, I got to play demos of both sequels and chat with members from Obsidian. Overall, they’re shaping up to be really compelling experiences in their own right.

Grounded 2

I’ll confess that I’m not much of a survival game person. I can see why someone might get invested in that challenging grind to stay alive, but we do that enough in real life already, and so I don’t find the concept all that appealing in a game. As a result, I never gave the original Grounded a shot, even though I eventually heard quite a few good things about the game. A whopping 25 million people have played it, after all, so it’s clearly done something right!

But as I played the Grounded 2 demo, I found myself quickly coming to appreciate that it’s not nearly as intensive as a survival game as I thought. Sure, you do still have to worry about consuming food and drink to avoid starvation and dehydration, but there aren’t extra metres to represent other parts of your character’s overall health to manage.

Instead, the complexity comes from the sheer volume of things you can craft. Everything from a simple spear or piece of armour to stations that can be used for cooking or skill-increasing research purposes, I was impressed by just how much was there. My love for Obsidian stems from its RPG roots, and those were evident in the depth and breadth of gear. Admittedly, the game — at least in this demo — didn’t even explain half of the stuff I saw in my inventory, but I have no doubt it will come in handy down the line.

I also didn’t realize how much I’d appreciate the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids setup. Seeing the world from this tiny perspective leads to a lot of fun environmental design, like a discarded comic book that I ascended to avoid some bugs on the ground. The core combat feels clunky, at least this early on, but I appreciate the ability to explore and circle around mobs like that. It’s easy to imagine how more advanced weaponry might come into play.

Funny enough, I quickly became deeply engrossed by the surprisingly compelling gameplay loop of exploring, finding materials and bringing them back to my research station to unlock new schematics. I was so distracted by this that I ended up avoiding the main objective, which would have led me to insect mounts, one of the marquee new features of Grounded 2.

Chris Parker, Obsidian co-founder and game director, says the mounts came about as part of a larger look at addressing community feedback from the first time. However, he notes that the addition of these rideable creatures had a ripple effect on overall game design. “When you add a feature like that into a game, it changes a little bit of everything about the world that you’re creating, and so in order for us to do that correctly, we basically were like, ‘We’re gonna rethink how the world works,” he explains, pointing to things like how far apart to now place points of interest and the level of detail to give certain areas. The end result is a sequel whose starting area alone is bigger than the entire world of its predecessor.

Another improvement, he says, is a new Omni-Tool that consolidates the hammer, axe, shovel and wrench into a single item. “If you played the first game, inventory management would sometimes get to be a pain in the butt, because you’re carrying around all these different tools and all these different weapons. And so [we] looked at it and said, ‘Hey, how do we refine this and make it fun and easy to do?’”

Something that’s helped enable Obsidian to make all of these leaps forward is its new co-development partner, Eidos Montreal. The Canadian developer is behind such acclaimed games as Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. That assistance proved invaluable in making a more expansive experience, given that the original Grounded‘s core development team was just 13 people. As Parker explains, Eidos Montreal aligns well with its team due to its experience making “narratively strong games,” “really deep characters and great character progression,” and “great gameplay.”

Obsidian is also leaning on its experience in making the first Grounded an early access release to give the sequel a similarly iterative model. One of the learnings from that framework, says Parker, is the ability to add more “narrative flair,” now that the team has gone through the hurdles of figuring out the survival mechanics. The sequel follows the same kids from the first game, but two years later, so it should serve as a decent jumping on point even if you’re a newcomer like me.

“With Grounded 2, there’s a great opportunity to get the narrative right off the gate, kind of have an ‘Act 1’ for the Early Access launch, and have it be its own sort of self-contained chapter,” adds producer Miles Winzeler. “And that also can help us inform how we handle larger updates down the line of going from Point A to Point B, both gameplay and narrative at each beat, and you take any fan feedback.”

Looking ahead, Parker says Grounded 2‘s early access journey will include a more sustainable and content-rich roadmap for players.”When we started Grounded early access, we were trying to do almost monthly updates, and that was a hassle. It didn’t work, and it didn’t make the community happy, and it didn’t make the team happy,” admits Parker. “So for us, we’re looking at longer, meatier updates that are in the four- or five-month range, where we’re delivering whole big chunks of content.”

All of that sounds really great to me, and I’m looking forward to seeing more when Grounded 2 launches in early access on Xbox Series X/S and PC on July 29.

The Outer Worlds 2

The Outer Worlds is another interesting game for me because it’s very much up my alley as an action-RPG, but I just never got around to it for whatever reason. I think its release at the tail end of 2019, shortly before the pandemic, is what sealed that. But like Grounded 2, this sequel presents the perfect opportunity to jump in if you never experienced its predecessor. In fact, The Outer Worlds 2 is even more of a standalone experience.

“I think we have a really unique position in that, like, because it’s a different colony,” explains creative director Leonard Boyarsky. “Because we’re dealing with different things than we did in the first game, we’re expanding on things that we did in the first game, it’s kind of like we need to reset everybody’s expectations, even if you have played before.”

For the uninitiated, The Outer Worlds is set in an alternate future in which megacorporations have colonized different star systems. Even as someone who was only tangentially familiar with the series, though, I knew that it got a lot of praise for its satirical approach to the subject matter. Naturally, then, I had to wonder: how has that critique evolved in the six years since the first game?

For Boyarsky, that comes down partly to expanding the number of factions. This includes the totalitarian government, the Protectorate, and Auntie’s Choice, a new megacorp formed by the merger of pharmaceutical company Auntie Cleo’s and consumer goods manufacturer Spacer’s Choice.

“In [The Outer Worlds], it was pretty much full-on indentured servitude. It was like they controlled your life from a ‘cradle to grave’ kind of thing” he says of the goals of these megacorps. “And here, they’ve hit on the thing of, ‘Oh, we’re gonna push individualism and freedom and self-determination — that means you’re on your own. If you get totaled, if you get fired, you’re screwed.” As game director Matt Singh says, this “makes it more cutthroat.”

Adding to that, Boyarsky says that The Outer Worlds 2 aims to show how the different factions react to the choices you’ve made through a radio system. “It’s just a great way to continue dealing with the same things, but show them from different points of view, which makes it like more dynamic and less one-note.”

This also helps address one criticism of the original game: that your choices didn’t feel impactful enough, both from a narrative and overall role-playing perspective. Singh acknowledges some of these issues, noting that they’re the result of a combination of the team’s more limited resources on the first game, coupled with the goal to introduce players to a new world.

“That meant not getting as complex as we usually have in the past with our with our RPGs,” he said. “The biggest thing was we wanted more area to explore. We wanted more different builds. We wanted a lot more reactivity. In the first game, we have a lot of immediate and mid-term reactivity, but we wanted more long-term reactivity.”

During our demo, I got to see what he meant. Right from the get-go, we could choose one of three save files that had builds for a more offensive, guns-blazing character, a stealth-focused archetype and a person who’s more efficient in speech to talk his way out of conflict. I had enough time to fully tinker with the first two, and I was extremely impressed by how much they shook up what happened.

In the mission, we’re tasked with trying to find a modulator for these mysterious rifts that are popping up everywhere, and that involves infiltrating a corpo facility. For my first run-through, I and my two companions (the floating robot Valeri and Tristan, a judge in the Protectorate military regime) ran in and killed everyone we saw. The gunplay felt quite punchy thanks to snappy aiming, feedback in the triggers, and the ability to double jump. On top of that, the weapons were quite fun, especially one that shot toxic sludge at enemies. Eventually, I reached the rift device, which allows you to create temporal platforms that add greater verticality to areas. Throw in this build’s “Brawny” characteristics to brute-force open certain doors, and exploration even in this relatively claustrophobic facility felt more exciting.

However, all of this naturally alerted the commander of the facility, Vaillancourt, and so he and his guards awaited me in the hangar I needed to escape through. After a long battle in which I directed my companions to attack different guards using their unique abilities, I prevailed, only for the base to suddenly come crashing and burning down as we ran for safety. This ultimately ended the demo, so I was then able to replay with the stealth build.

Immediately, I found myself loving an incredibly powerful silenced pistol and dagger combo for sneaky kills. But my greater caution also let me meet an NPC I missed the first time, a lead researcher who has beef with Vaillancourt. As she tells it, she was in a company accident that left her missing an arm, a situation that was made worse when Vaillancourt framed her for it. Given that resentment, she says she’ll help me quietly make my way through to get the rift device in exchange for finding info in Vaillincourt’s room that will exonerate her.

Right off the bat, this created a neat bit of world-building that also made me interact with the environment in a completely different way. And while the ticking clock of the demo made me stumble and alert some guards, Obsidian told us that you could indeed have made it through by only stealth killing a few guards at most and then — provided you held up your end of the bargain — the researcher would activate turrets to keep the guards at bay while you escaped.

“One of our pillars is ‘simple but deep.’ What that means is, if you’re just looking at it in broad strokes, it’s easy to take in, and you can opt into additional complexity. So, take the stealth mechanics that we’ve put in place before. We’ve broadened your tool set. Now you have distraction devices. Now you have sneak attacks. You can take people down. You can dissolve bodies and whatnot,” says Singh. “But you don’t have to engage with all of those systems. We try to dole them out over time […] and we make them optional for the player to lean into. And we do that across the board with all the different types of build options.”

It’s reassuring to see how Obsidian is building upon the strong world it created with deeper mechanics and greater player agency. I can’t wait to see how it all comes together when The Outer Worlds 2 launches on Xbox Series X/S and PC (plus Game Pass) on October 29.

Image credit: Xbox