Obsidian Home entertainment has actually kept its pledge up until now of using feedback relating to Grounded to make the game a much betterexperience Considering that it hit Xbox Game Preview back in July, the team has added new locations to check out in the yard, a new zipline travel, and a terrifying encounter against a (relatively) huge crow. Its latest update is the greatest one yet, including a koi pond and its terrifying fishy homeowner. Players who choose to check out the pond’s depths do so at their own hazard, thanks to its patrolling koi and, sadly, the new diving-bell spider.
“The koi pond was designed in November of last year, so that’s how far in advance we were prepping this,” says game director Adam Brennecke. “We always knew we wanted a koi pond. We were designing and discussing what we could do with this area and make it cool. We made a big list of how many creatures could exist in this area, and one of them was the diving-bell spider.” That real- life animal has an impressive routine of protecting air bubbles so that it can breathe while searching for victim undersea. “We were like, ‘Yep, that one’s on the list,’ just because we knew, even at that stage, how cool spiders were in the game and how scary they were, and we just wanted to expand on that.”
The koi itself isn’t exactly something that slides around a stunning rural waterfeature For one, the pond, like the rest of Grounded’s back-yard setting, has actually participated in a state of overlook. The water is foul-looking and dirty, that makes it simple to get shocked by any number of water-based animals. “We’ve all seen those koi fish that are the big badasses in the pond, and they look so gnarly, like they’ve been there forever,” Brenneckesays “They’re all scraped up. That’s what we wanted to get across; this thing’s been here for a long time, and it basically owns this area. This is the koi’s turf. This creature owns this area, and you’re just a little speck in it.”
The big fish isn’t straight-out hostile to you, however it will end up being aggressive if you get too close or technique specific locations within the pond. There’s a good chance you’ll find one of those areas as you check out, along with a number of other points of interest. An undersea laboratory supplies some alluring new narrative information, and your small character can find things like toy dinosaurs and quarters in and around the pond.
Brennecke says this is the greatest update that Grounded has actually gotten up until now, however that the team isn’t ready to stop believing of ways to enhance its survivalgame Combat is getting some tuning, after early feedback showed that component of the game was too fixed. “We took a step back and we looked at a lot of games with combat that we liked and analyzed them in depth, and one thing we found was we felt like we didn’t have enough creature attacks,” hesays “The spider, for example, had three attacks. What if we added three more variations? What would that do? That’s kind of what we’re doing right now with all of our creatures.”
The team is also taking a look at the idea of family pets, and how they may suit Grounded’sworld “We want to have the pet aphid, for example, where you can have that aphid and it follows you around and you can name it,” Brenneckesays “These are all just ideas right now on paper. I think that’s something where we really want to have that experience of having something that you can take care of. I think that’s the goal of that.”
They’re not family pets, per se, however Brennecke says his team is attempting to find ways that players might connect with the game’s ants in more fascinatingways “I think that’s a really cool thing that we want to explore, of having ways of making ants be controlled by the player and you can have the ants do certain things. … I think once the player can interact with that layer of the A.I., I think there are going to be a lot of cool opportunities for us as game developers but I think the players will enjoy that, too.”
Brennecke says his team has actually grown to add a couple of engineers to help with including the Xbox Series X/S. Those new consoles are diminishing load times and also improving the general framerate and gameplay responsiveness. Those works with aside, Brennecke says he wishes to preserve the small size of histeam “Overall, the team is the same size and we’re going to continue to make cool stuff. We have tons of ideas, and we just hope we have enough time to get those features in and make them shine.”
