Grounded - shrunken kids first-person co-op survival game from Obsidian

[Viata]

I'd say "how the mighty has fallen" but that would be a lie, they were never mighty as Obsidian.

 

[santino27]

 

[markec]

Last good game Obsidian made was New Vegas in 2010 and there is no sign that that drought will end anytime soon.

 

[J_C]

Gameplay with Adam Brennecke:

Slaughtering all those little bugs, which didn't pose any threat to you. I'm calling PETA!

 

[vonAchdorf]

The beard makes Adam look 20 years older.

 

[Orma]

 

[Viata]

Tbh, seems to be an old man playing games:

 

[Infinitron]

Grounded getting the full court press from Game Informer: https://www.gameinformer.com/cover-reveal/2020/04/21/cover-reveal-grounded

Cover Reveal – Grounded

Obsidian has made a name for itself within the RPG space, having worked on titles including Pillars of Eternity, Fallout: New Vegas, and The Outer Worlds. A small team within the studio wanted to do something a little different with Grounded, a survival game that takes place within the confines of a single backyard. If that sounds like a small chunk of real estate for a game, there's a twist: You've been shrunken down to about a centimeter, which makes encounters with aphids, ants, and – of course – spiders, potentially deadly.

For our latest cover story, we played Grounded for several hours and had lengthy discussions with the team. We learned how they landed on its Honey, I Shrunk the Kids-like setup, what working within that tiny scale meant for its design, and how they've adapted to their new working-from-home reality.



Of course, the extended look at Grounded is only part of the latest issue. Our other big feature is directly aimed at people who might not think there are many noteworthy games on the horizon. Over the course of more than 20 pages, we dive into 60 of the most interesting games that the staff is looking forward to. You're sure to recognize some of the heavy hitters, but our hope is that you'll find some more things to anticipate as we edge ever closer to next-gen.

Since many people are stuck at home right now, we've put together a few roundups to help pass the time, too. Whether you're looking for some great recommendations for getting into pen-and-paper RPGs, want to try streaming, or just need a fidget-spinner alternative to keep your hands busy, we've got you covered.

Print subscribers can expect their issues to begin arriving in the coming weeks. The digital edition of this issue launches later today for PC/Mac, iOS, and Google Play. You can also get the latest issue through third-party apps on Nook and Kindle later this week. To switch your print subscription to digital, click here, or to create a new subscription, click here.

 

[Roguey]

Looks like MS has a lot of faith in its potential if it's worth a Game Informer cover.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

shrunken kids first-person co-op survival game

Now tell me a Willow Ufgood village simulator wouldn't be an insta-buy.

 

[markec]

I have a problem with faggotry, will they make modes that removes all of it from their games?

 

[Viata]

I have a problem with faggotry, will they make modes that removes all of it from their games?

Yes. It's called "Uninstall.exe".

 

[markec]

I have a problem with faggotry, will they make modes that removes all of it from their games?

Yes. It's called "Uninstall.exe".

 

[toro]

Last good game Obsidian made was New Vegas in 2010 and there is no sign that that drought will end anytime soon.

PoE could have been good.

They had everything they needed but the story was retarded and the encounters were mostly trash.

 

[Ismaul]

I have a problem with faggotry, will they make modes that removes all of it from their games?

Yes. It's called "Uninstall.exe".

Should be the same for arachnophobia.

Fucking people pandering to the weakest of humanity. Victim culture.

 

[sser]

There better be some guy on the back porch smugly sipping coffee while you fend off pixelized spiders.

 

[ADL]

Gods, it is Fortnite clone... before it went battle royal.

I wish it was like Fortnite Save the World. StW is a fun tower defense game and infinitely better than survival shit.

 

[Anthedon]

What in the actual fuck is this shit? Jesus .

 

[Andhaira]

Reminds me of the announcement for Dungeon Siege 3

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/04/28/three-big-ways-grounded-nails-its-micro-scaled-setup

Three Big Ways Grounded Nails Its Micro-Scaled Setup

Obsidian’s upcoming game Grounded takes one of my favorite setups – little guy in a big world – and builds a complex survival adventure around it. Don’t let the kid-friendly veneer throw you off; at this scale, the backyard is a perilous place, with danger lurking around every corner. Or, more accurately in this case, around the other side of that titanic discarded juice box. The setup got my attention, but the studio’s attention to detail and determination to make the most of this unusual scale kept it. With that in mind, here are three big ways Grounded is fulfilling the promise of its micro-sized world.

The Sense of Scale
When you start Grounded, you begin in what appears to be a rainforest. Everywhere you look is lush and green. Surprise! Those “trees” are actually blades of grass. And if you look up, you can see a tree, house, and other things you’d notice in a backyard – though they tower over you, and are impossibly far away. Obsidian makes the most of this change in perspective, not only pulling you down to ground level and showing you life at that scale, but having fun with it, too.

Things operate at a different level when you’re a centimeter tall. As an example, surface tension is such that you can kick a blob of dew if you manage to knock one down from a plant. And if you yourself happen to get knocked down from a plant, you can slow down your fall by holding onto a tiny piece of dandelion fluff and gliding softly down.

I’ll get into it more in an upcoming feature, but the backyard is also home to a variety of objects, such as discarded toys and other familiar sights. Here, the team balanced how things would actually look at the scale with meeting your expectations. “We’ve noticed that there are some manmade objects that don’t look quite right at the small scale,” says game director Adam Brennecke. “So think of a soda can or something else like even a quarter. You imagine how big it is in your head, and when you actually see it at that scale, you think, ‘Actually I thought it was going to be smaller or bigger.’ So sometimes we fudge it a little.”

Spoiler

Pint-sized Peril
At this scale, you’re in danger of becoming the next meal for creatures you’d ordinarily ignore. Grounded’s backyard is like a lot of other backyards, in that it’s home to a wide array of insects. At one end of the scale, they’ll ignore you completely. Others are curious about this strange new intruder, and want to get in close to size you up. And unfortunately, there are more than a few insects that would like nothing more than to munch on your tiny body like the crumb it has become. They’re all part of a larger ecosystem, and your job is to find a safe place within it.

“That’s something that we wanted to try out and push the technology as best as we can to see where can we take the simulation aspect to where it feels like a living world, where all the insects are doing their own thing,” Brennecke says. “At first, they’re not interested in you because they don’t see you as a threat, but then as you get stronger, they see you as a threat and a hostile thing and they’ll want to fight back.”

Take the ants, for example. When you encounter them at first, they regard you with curiosity. They’ll certainly fight back if you attack, but otherwise they’re content to take a look at you and move along. They’re more interested in food, and fortunately you aren’t an obvious meal. Get between them and their next meal, however, and that’s when trouble can form.

“If there’s something like a large apple core or a hot dog bit or a cookie, the ants will actually form a trail to those large food objects and bite off a little piece and go back to their anthill,” Brennecke says. “You can interact with the simulation in different ways. You can build a base around that, and the ants will ultimately be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? You’re hoarding all the food,’ and they’ll send out soldier ants to go beat you up and destroy your defenses.”

Spiders and other aggressive insects aren’t quite as nuanced. If they see you, they’ll immediately attack; you aren’t getting in the way of their food, you are the food. Or in the case of creatures such as bombardier beetles, their corrosive spray will hurt your character, regardless of the insect’s ultimate motivations.

In true survival-game fashion, the trick is finding ways to explore the world safely to get crafting materials to further extend your range of exploration. “An analogy I’ve used in the past has been similar to an Indiana Jones movie, where it’s action and excitement, and there’s a real sense of danger, but it also has a level of approachability to it,” says lead environment artist Sean Dunny. “We want it to look recognizable like a backyard, we wanted it to be this sort of, pardon the pun, larger-than-life and inviting world for you to be a part of. Where you’re like, ‘Ah, there’s danger out there, but there’s also excitement and adventure.’”

A World You Want to Explore
After spending several hours with Grounded, I was most impressed with how much fun it was to simply explore the yard. The team took great pains to make sure that something weird, recognizable, or interesting is just over the next hill or around the corner.

“One of the things that I really like, just from a visual standpoint, are the garden lights,” Dunny says. “At night, in our nighttime you see almost what looks like a lighthouse in the middle of the fog. That’s something that we talked about for nighttime gameplay, it can be really imposing. So having these points of light to act as landmarks during the night, even these things that don’t necessarily have direct gameplay impacts have this indirect thing, where they provide a way to find your way around at night.”

Those lights come in handy, since you never know what you’ll bump into in the dark. “Each creature has a vital system that tracks its own hunger level and sleepiness level,” says art director Kaz Aruga. “If you follow something around like spiders for instance, we have two types: we have the orb-weaver that roams around during the day, and then we have the nocturnal wolf spider. One type will go to sleep, and the other type will come crawling out, and the yard kind of shifts in that dynamic way.”

Whatever the time of day, Grounded isn’t just having you survive for survival’s sake; there’s a reason why you’ve been shrunken down to this size, even if you don’t know what that is. I’ve had a blast scouring this backyard inch by inch, but let’s face it – once you’ve seen everything, you need something to do beyond merely staying alive. Grounded is doing something a little different from other survival games, in that it’s telling a structured story, too.

I got a glimpse of it while I played. During the early moments of the game, you’re guided through the process of powering on several high-tech pylons by a mysterious voice. When activated, these should help to return you to your normal size. Things don’t go well, and the machines eventually overload. The demo ends just as you meet your helper, a tiny robot named BURG.L.

I’ve played my share of survival games over the years, but it’s not a genre I’m naturally drawn toward. I like the freeform nature of these experiences, but I also appreciate having more formalized goals and motivations. I only dipped my toes in Grounded’s story, but it seems like a fun mystery to dive into. And it just happens to be one set in an innately fun location, both to play in and to create.

“I think everyone is staring at the ground now, just looking and dissecting what they’re seeing,” Brennecke says of his team. “'Hey that would be an interesting material to use or a little setting.’ Everyone is taking pictures of weird things that they’re finding on the ground. 'Oh, this is a weird mushroom patch, it might be a cool place to explore.' It’s been a lot of fun, thinking about the things that you interact with on a daily basis at scale, and how can that fit into our world."

Grounded is coming to Xbox One and PC via Game Pass and early access on July 28.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

This is the Wrath of the Righteous killer everyone is waiting for.

 

[Turuko]

https://www.gameinformer.com/exclusive-video/2020/04/30/a-day-in-the-life-of-grounded

A Day In The Life Of Grounded

Grounded, the miniature survival sim from Obsidian Entertainment is Game Informer's latest cover story, and Obsidian has been kind enough to give us extended access to an early build from home. The game has a lot of promise, and we wanted to show off the core, self-driven gameplay that comes once you've spent a few hours getting your tiny feet under you.

So enjoy a taste of Grounded's moment-to-moment gameplay, and come back next week for a look at the game's varied wildlife! For more Grounded, listen to us discuss our gameplay impressions on last week's episode of The Game Informer Show.

on one hand the most positive thing i can muster for this game is that "it's not for me"

on the other hand the combat looks better than the outer worlds

 

[Nano]

The art style is awful. This game just screams cheap.

 

[Fenix]

cheap

That's the mottotoday for everything - cars, homes, cloths, iphones and such.

 

[Infinitron]

Last month's stream uploaded to YouTube:



https://www.gameinformer.com/2020/05/05/looking-into-groundeds-unnatural-wonders

Looking Into Grounded’s Unnatural Wonders

A backyard can be a treacherous place to explore when you’re shrunken down to a centimeter. That’s the central conceit behind Grounded, the upcoming survival game from Obsidian Entertainment. Danger may be a constant companion, but we were struck by something else during our hours of hands-on time: The backyard is a really fun place to explore.

“It definitely feels like the one thing we talk about is making it feel like a theme park,” says game director Adam Brennecke. “One thing we’re trying to do is make it feel like every turn and everywhere you go there’s something cool to find – not only the stuff materials wise, but there might be a cool manmade object or a little secret cave that you’ve never seen before.”

They’re definitely on the right track. Head out in any random direction, and you eventually stumble upon an object that’s fun, interesting, or flat-out weird. And even though we still didn’t understand why, for instance, there’s a disembodied action-figure head out in the middle of nowhere, the developers have spent a lot of time poring over its back story.

“There’s an object in the world – why is it there? Who put it there? Who made this? Where is it manufactured?” Brennecke says, going through just some of the details his team sweats. “What is the company that makes this? Where can you buy it? And that’s just for manmade objects. I think that’s what makes Obsidian games so great. We care about the games so much, and we talk about this stuff probably way more than we should, and I think those details come through. Even as a developer, I love Obsidian games, because we spend so much time on that stuff.”

Creating props at this scale took some adjusting, too. “It took us a little bit to figure out how to even make things this large," says lead environment artist Sean Dunny. "If you think about large objects in a traditionally scaled video game, you think about a building, which is made up of a bunch of different composite parts, so each of these pieces can be done separately and then made to look the way you want. But when you have something the size of a building but is all one cohesive, seamless material, it becomes a little bit trickier. So we’ve had to create some custom materials and shaders to give us that up-close detail that we want while also maintaining a read from far away.”

Grounded’s overall visual presentation is a departure from a lot of survival games, too. Its world is bright and cheery looking; even the spiders, as creepy and dangerous as they are, are stylize to a point where they almost look kind of cute. That overall aesthetic is at its peak in the graphic design for many of the various manmade objects within the game. The products you come across have bold and purposefully awkward designs, with logos and branding that lean into Grounded’s ‘90s setting. The team credits senior artist Mitch Loidolt with much of that aesthetic. He even created a document titled, “Why the ‘90s are a cool time period to set a game,” which highlighted some of the visual touchstones that they could lean on. “I didn’t want to be mocking it in any way,” Loidolt says. “I didn’t want it to be super out there and blast your face with the ‘90s. Just to bring you back to that time, is all.”

After seeing some of the manmade objects in the world and hearing about all the work that went into their creation, we wanted to learn more. Here are some super esoteric stories behind a few of the objects that you’ll encounter early on in Grounded.

Spoiler

Juice Boxes
At Grounded’s scale, an ordinarily unassuming juice box becomes an imposing landmark. The rectangular object is immediately recognizable, with a bent straw jutting out of one end and dribbling juice onto the ground. Dunny says making props for Grounded has been significantly different from his work on Fallout: New Vegas, for example. Since small details are scaled up, it’s important that objects feel authentic. “I’m actually looking up diagrams of how juice boxes are folded together and the manufacturing process to get that sort of thing right,” he says.

“The juice box, we actually have a corporation called Punch-O that makes those juice boxes,” Brennecke says. “They’re a part of a large company that has their hands in lots of different things, which is called Mouthtown. The Punch-O brand is very similar to Hi-C, for example. Mitch made his own almost storyline of all the characters on the Punch-O boxes. For example, we have Lemon Crime, which is the lemon-lime drink.”

“I like ‘Armed Raspberry,’” Loidolt adds. “It’s the Juicestice Squad; they fight the bad fruits.”

The Flying Disc
Part of the backyard is walled off by a thick hedge. Getting up it may seem impossible, until you notice something familiar sticking out of the vegetation. “One Item that I particularly like is the Frisbee, because I love Frisbee in general,” says art director Kaz Aruga. “That thing came out of personal experience. We used to have this tall hedge next to our office, and we used to chuck them and they’d always get stuck in the hedge, so I like that little detail in the yard. That thing, the way it’s wedged in, it actually serves as a little platform in the hedge biome. You can have a little boss fight with a spider there.”

A Baseball
One of the first things you might run into that sells Grounded’s sense of scale is an otherwise ordinary baseball. It’s massive. Unlike the juice box, which releases life-sustaining juice from its straw, the ball doesn’t serve any gameplay purpose. Instead, it’s a landmark that’s close to a fairly large clearing. When you’re still getting your bearings, landmarks like these are vital. “I tend to build near the baseball, because it’s a very flat, open area, and I like building massive megastructures,” Dunny says.

When I first came across it, I circled the ball and soaked up all the detail. Everything from the grain of the leather to the stitching has been carefully reconstructed. There’s also a cartoon face on it. Was there a little story there? As it turns out, there is.
“I think the little cartoon character that Mitch drew is our Feargus face,” Brennecke says, referring to Obsidian co-founder and studio head Feargus Urquhart. “We call it Chunky Chub’s baseball, which is the branding for the baseball equipment that we have in the yard.”

Was that something that Loidolt cleared ahead of time? “It’s a bad habit of mine, trying to reduce peoples’ faces to the easiest drawing that I can think of," he says. “It’s definitely an ‘ask forgiveness’ situation.”

Soda Cans
Soda cans are scattered throughout the yard, possible evidence of the “jerk teens” that Loidolt says throw their trash from a nearby gas station. The best part of the cans is that you can crawl into them and build a small base – completely protected from spiders and some of the other large pests in the yard. Getting in used to be even easier, too.

“When I first started making the mesh for the soda can, I got a message from Mitch a couple of days later and it was like, ‘Hey, this is incorrect. You have a wide-mouth soda can, and those didn’t exist at the time,’” Dunny says. “So I had to actually modify the mesh to fit with the time period of our game. It’s certain things like that, where you have to take into account not just how the thing is actually made but how it was made in the early ‘90s.”

“Mitch also made Jabby Cola, which is my face and my nickname,” Brennecke adds. “If you see Jabby Cola, that’s me, which is great. I’m on a soda can now!”

Toy Head
One of the stranger objects in the yard is the head of an action figure – and the body is nowhere to be seen. There’s not much to go on, since it is just a head, but Obsidian has bigger plans for the toy.

“We actually have our own cartoon universe that we’re making,” Brennecke says. It’s inspired by He-Man, but they obviously couldn’t just lift that licensed character. Instead, they put their own spin on the character. “His name is Yoked-Girth. He’s just like pure muscle. He’s like a lot of the action heroes from that period smashed all into one character. We’re also developing a toy line and a comic book.” There’s also a chance that players will run into toys based on their Skeletor analog.

The team was happy to talk about the minutiae behind many of Grounded’s landmarks, but only to a certain point. There were plenty of times where they held back a bit, wanting to keep some of it a mystery.

“One of the things that I really love about this style of game is the discussion it brings about,” Dunny says. “I love reading fan theories about games that I like. Even seeing a Wikipedia page or a Gamepedia and seeing people piece together these things. By leaving less of it explicitly said, one of the things that I’m personally interested in is fostering that kind of discussion and encouraging that kind of community involvement.”

If you’re looking to get involved in Grounded, you don’t have long to wait. Grounded is going into Game Preview and early access on Xbox One and PC starting July 28.