Grounded 2: Obsidian Says Bug Mounts Forced a Full World Rebuild
Obsidian Entertainment says rideable bug mounts, not a change of heart about the franchise, are the real reason Grounded 2 exists as a full sequel rather than a content update for the original game. Speaking to Shacknews during its E4 2026 coverage, producer Marcus Morgan said the first game’s backyard simply wasn’t built to support the mounted creatures the studio calls “Buggies,” forcing the team to design an entirely new map from scratch.
Why Buggies Made a Sequel Unavoidable
Morgan told Shacknews, “Factor number one, and the most important factor, was we knew we had to build a completely new space to sustain ‘buggies’ – our mount system in the game,” adding that “with Grounded 1, the way we did like level design and area design, it wasn’t really designed in mind to have mounts in the world. We needed to revamp and make a whole new world to support buggies, which is the main feature of Grounded 2.” In a separate interview with MobileSyrup, Morgan reinforced the point directly: “First and foremost, it’s got to be Buggies. All of Grounded 2 was built around mounts and Buggies. It’s one of the main geneses for why we needed to go make Grounded 2. We needed to create this brand-new area that supports mounted gameplay that wasn’t in the original.”
Game director Chris Parker echoed the same reasoning to GamesRadar+, explaining that “[Mounts were] something we wanted to do with the first game,” before adding that “when you add a feature like that into a game, it kind of 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. We’re gonna think how to make this sort of an integral feature within the game.'”
The Original Backyard Wasn’t Built for Riding
Speaking to Checkpoint Gaming, producer Miles Winzeler and senior community manager Aarik Dorobiala went further into the mechanical clash between mounts and the first game’s design. Dorobiala explained that “probably one of the biggest reasons we didn’t add buggies to Grounded 1 is it’s such a game changing feature that we would have to redesign how movement in the backyard works, compared to the park where we have much more open space, because we already had zip lines that people set up, like these networks of webs to get around.”
He added that combat balance was just as big an obstacle, noting “the backyard was not equipped to have buggies without doing like a major overhaul on combat balance, making it make sense for movement and traversing through the backyard. And while the backyard is very big, with buggies, it would seem really small. So that’s why we decided to move that for Grounded 2.”
Morgan gave a similar breakdown to GamingBolt, framing it as a scale problem rather than a simple feature addition. He said Obsidian had already “already prototyped out making multiple creatures in Grounded 1,” but “the challenge was that we didn’t design all the spaces to match that new style of play,” since changing traversal speed meant reworking the distance between points of interest, interior spaces and environmental hazards — “that’s why the game’s so much bigger.”
Brookhollow Park Was Designed Mount-First
Grounded 2 swaps the tight, zip-line-laced backyard of the original for Brookhollow Park, a considerably larger playground setting. Creative director Justin Vazquez, of co-developer Eidos-Montréal, has separately said mounts and the park layout were designed hand in hand, going as far as to state that the team “couldn’t have done Buggies without the park” and vice versa, underlining just how intertwined the world-building and mount design became during pre-production.
That interlocking design shows up in the numbers Obsidian has shared around Early Access: even the game’s opening zone, representing only a fraction of the full map, is already roughly the size of the entire backyard from the first Grounded, according to the studio’s own Early Access messaging.
PS5 Players Join the Park on August 11
Grounded 2 launched into Early Access on July 29, 2025, on Xbox Series X/S and PC through Xbox Game Preview and Steam Early Access, alongside Xbox Game Pass. Obsidian has now confirmed on its official Grounded 2 news page that the game “launches on PlayStation 5 on August 11, bringing an entirely new community of players into the park as we continue growing the game throughout our early access development period.”
That PS5 debut arrives alongside the Into the Abyss content update, which Obsidian describes as “our next major content update,” opening the pond and giving players “an entirely new area to explore both above and below the water’s surface.” For Australian and New Zealand players who picked up the original Grounded’s later PlayStation port, it’s a signal that Obsidian intends to keep bringing the sequel’s mount-driven survival loop to console audiences beyond the Xbox ecosystem, rather than treating Game Pass exclusivity as permanent.
With buggies now confirmed as the mechanical foundation the entire sequel was engineered around, the bigger test for Obsidian and Eidos-Montréal will be whether Brookhollow Park’s mount-first design holds up as more players, platforms and content updates pile into Early Access over the coming months.
Read also: id Software: Studio Still Has “Crew We Need” Despite Xbox Layoffs
Join the Conversation