Grounded Is Exiting Early Access With 1.0 Release After Two Years

ign.com:

After two years of development alongside the community, and over 10 million players on Xbox Game Pass, Obsidian’s backyard survival game Grounded is finally getting a 1.0 release this September.

1.0 brings Grounded out of early access, as well as adds a number of major updates, including the introduction of a new part of the backyard (the upper yard), new armor and weapon recipes, new secrets, and a new boss: the Mantis. By far the most impactful of these updates is the completion of Grounded’s story about a group of kids shrunk to insect-size and forced to survive in a backyard full of much larger insects and other hazards.

IGN spoke with game director Adam Brennecke, who’s been with Obsidian for 18 years now – almost since the studio’s inception. Having worked on a number of projects from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 as a programmer all the way to executive producer on Pillars of Eternity, by the time Deadfire was wrapping, he’d naturally had a lot of experience with RPGs. But he and a handful of others at Obsidian wanted to try something different: a survival game that still embraced the studio’s RPG storytelling background.

A lot has changed for that small internal team since they started brainstorming the game that would become Grounded. They’ve grown from 12 to 20 members, though Brennecke says it’s still the smallest team he’s ever worked on. Their game has launched in early access to a level of success that surprised even Brennecke. And Xbox acquired Obsidian during Grounded’s development, offering Obsidian tools and resources they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to, like a user research group to help them develop accessibility features such as arachnophobia mode.

The visibility push from Xbox didn’t