Grounded’s early access released at the end of last month, quickly becoming a best-seller on Steam and another hit for Obsidian Entertainment. Despite its work on the Fallout series, Obsidian's Grounded is the first truly survival-focused game released by the developer, who began reintroducing survival elements to Fallout through New Vegas’ Hardcore mode back in 2010.
In Grounded, up to 4 players must cooperate, playing as kids shrunk down in a back-yard science experiment gone wrong. It’s a race to find food, build shelter, and avoid creepy crawlies. Grounded’s immediate success can be put in comparison with Fallout 76’s rocky release to show why bigger isn’t always better.
Survival vs. Sandbox
Faith in Bethesda has dwindled over the past few years, at least in the eyes of scorned fans, and Obsidian has been more than happy to pick up the slack. With many gamers assuming that Avowed will release before The Elder Scrolls 6, Grounded is another demonstration that Obsidian may be able to provide the experiences Bethesda fans have been missing.
Unlike the Fallout RPGs, Grounded is a pure survival game. There’s only one voiced NPC, the players’ robot guide BURG.L, and the players must manage their food, fatigue and shelter as in traditional games of the genre. Players in Fallout 76 also have to manage their thirst, hunger, fatigue, and equipment. However, players can also buy repair kits with Atoms, which are purchased through Fallout 76's microtransactions. While Fallout 76 sacrifices true atmospheric survival for sandbox exploration, Grounded’s world is small but genuinely intimidating.
Grounded’s survival mechanics work to heighten the player’s extant sense of vulnerability rather than simply being stats to maintain. Food and water meters, when depleted, will leave the player extremely vulnerable to attack, but not dead outright. It adds to the tense atmosphere without being frustrating, rather than feeling like a chore like Fallout 76's repair kits.
Not only that, but by having the game’s co-op capped at 4 players, survival in Grounded is far more strategic than in Fallout 76. While the average Fallout 76 player may find themselves suddenly blown to pieces by a random player in power armor, the greatest predator in Grounded are the spiders. While terrifying, the game’s creatures also have different behavioral patterns, and figuring them out is all part of the fun, helping the player build a relationship with the game world.
Atmosphere and Satisfaction
The role of atmosphere in Grounded’s success as a survival game cannot be understated. As a new IP, the world the Grounded player is thrown into is completely unfamiliar, though wrapped in the nostalgic trappings of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The concept itself works to make the player feel far more vulnerable than in Fallout 76, which marketed itself with a trailer showing players happily and nonchalantly battling the various creatures of the wasteland.
Grounded’s building system also more closely resembles games like Facepunch's Rust in its fundamental mechanics, where players have to start building from raw materials like grass and acorns, while in Fallout 76 most materials are gathered in scrap form. The player cannot chop down trees in Fallout, whereas they can do the equivalent (for their size) in Grounded, making the overall building progression take longer but feel far more satisfying and natural.
Ultimatelym Grounded’s scale is its greatest strength as a survival game. By allowing a limited team of just 12 developers to create a small and experimental new IP, Obsidian was able to create a game which feels far more focused than Bethesda's. Fallout 76 is torn between providing the RPG experience expected from the series' main games, a true multiplayer survival experience, and a wacky sandbox world to explore.
Grounded, on the other hand, is able to limit its scope to a smaller, more personal survival experience that has been tailored to create an atmosphere that’s at once fun and intimidating. It’s co-operative multiplayer is less chaotic than Fallout 76 can be, allowing the world to develop its own character and the players to develop their own uneasy relationship with that world.
Grounded is available in early access for Xbox Game Pass.