I wasn’t expecting this either. Obsidian Entertainment’s first game for (relatively new) owner Microsoft is Grounded, a survival adventure which is essentially Honey I Shrunk the Kids. You and your friends play tiny teens in a sunny back garden filled with huge human debris and insects. You chop towering blades of grass to make bases and spit-roast aphids to eat. Honestly, it’s captivating, but it’s hardly the Obsidian Entertainment we know, hardly the studio which built Fallout: New Vegas and The Outer Worlds.
But don’t panic. The most important thing to know is Grounded is not, by any means, Obsidian having a midlife crisis. Only a dozen people are working on it out of an Obsidian army of 185. It’s a try-something-new experiment.
“Just like with Outer Worlds, we have big RPGs being worked on right now,” Grounded game director Adam Brennecke told me. “We have a lot of stuff being worked on right now. I like to tell people [Grounded] is actually a pretty small portion of the entire Obsidian family, so I would expect to see things fans are expecting from Obsidian in the future.”
Another important thing to know is Grounded was not Microsoft’s idea – this is not a ‘Rare making Kinect Sports’ situation.
“We were discussing doing a survival game for some time, even while we were working on Pillars of Eternity [2],” Brennecke said – he being one of two people responsible for Pillars’ existence (though sadly the Pillars of Eternity series has now been shelved). For reference: Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire came out in May 2018, and Microsoft acquired Obsidian in November 2018.