Grounded 2 is on its way, with early access kicking off later this month—which, if you've been slighted by sequels before, might have you wringing your keyboards over what's going to happen to Grounded 1. Well, don't tear up your mechanicals just yet. Executive producer Marcus Morgan at Obsidian wants to put your fears at ease.
"We actually have this strong passion to ensure our games can stand the test of time and keep updating through history," Morgan explains in an interview with Eurogamer. "There's a strong desire on our side to make sure that our games are preserved."
While Grounded 1 isn't going to be getting much in the way of story content anymore, since "that's the continuation of Grounded 2", Morgan explains that they aren't just throwing the first to the wolves—or the aphids, as it were: "There's a maintenance and a desire that that game will always exist. So we'll keep that up; it's not going anywhere if people still want to play Grounded 1 as well."
This is due to some savvy design work on Obsidian's part. That is, never building with a limited-time live service model in mind at all—which, to be fair, is slightly easier to do with a survival game, where peer-to-peer has been an option for years:
"Multiplayer is done through peer-to-peer, which in first blush, feels antiquated versus dedicated servers. But we were able to blend that with shared worlds … It gives that experience of being able to have a more dedicated server vibe, but it doesn't have that same requirement of actually having servers."
He's quick to emphasise that this whole thing's "no commentary on the Stop Killing Games stuff"—and I certainly do not blame a producer at a studio helmed by Microsoft, of all companies, to be wary of kicking that particular anthill.
For context, Stop Killing Games is a movement that's been picking up major steam in recent weeks—thanks to the raw, unfiltered power of YouTube drama and an impassioned plea by progenitor Ross Scott. An initiative to get game preservation placed in front of the EU Commission recently hit 1.4 million signatures, so it's going pretty well.
I'm not sure Morgan needs to be supremely wary, though. Grounded 1's design seems to be exactly the kind of thing Stop Killing Games is advocating for: Videogames with built-in end of life protection, a lack of dependency on servers, or a strategy to ensure players can still emulate or host personal servers if they bought the game in the past.
Anyway, while I believe Morgan in that he's not spitting a 'hot take', or whatever you kids are calling it nowadays, I think the fact these discussions are becoming more commonplace in interviews (and even shareholder meetings) is a sign that Stop Killing Games really has gained some proper momentum. If it weren't, then the clarification wouldn't need to be made in the first place.
Even if it's not writ into law, I can see 'we've got an end-of-life plan' becoming popular enough PR politics for current studios, in the same vein as devs promising their games with microtransactions won't let you buy power—either way, if you're attached to your Grounded 1 save file, it's not becoming compost.
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