Grounded 2 won’t have local multiplayer support, just as there wasn’t – and still isn’t – LAN support in the current Grounded game. “We can confirm that Grounded 2 will be consistent with the prior game and does not support LAN multiplayer,” a spokesperson from Obsidian told Eurogamer. I asked for an explanation why but was told Obsidian had nothing further to share.
It’s a shame. The sequel presents Obsidian with an opportunity to revisit areas of the teens-shrunk-in-a-backyard co-op game that could use revision, and LAN multiplayer is one of these, trivial though it might seem.
Currently, in order to play Grounded with someone in the same room or house as you – and it sounds like this will be the case for the sequel – you need to connect via the internet first. In other words, you need to send a signal out of your house so it can be sent back to your house to connect to the other person’s machine. The result? Latency, or lag as it’s more commonly called, which causes a delayed response in the game and rubber-banding – a term used to describe characters or creatures which fast-forward suddenly to different places in the game.
Lag is not only annoying to play with but in Grounded’s case, deadly. Back at launch, in 2020, I spent a couple of days writing guides about how to kill the spiders in Grounded, because they’re a menace, patrolling large areas of the back garden and attacking with speed and aggression if they catch you with eyesight of them. The wolf spiders in particular were ferocious. It was possible to defeat them if you learnt their attack patterns and had precise parry timing, but it was still hard to do.
However, confident I could deal with the spiders, I encouraged my partner to play the game with me, both of us playing on different machines in the same room. But I couldn’t beat the spiders; the lag introduced by connecting via the internet meant I couldn’t reliably perform the parry timings I’d learned. If I hosted the game, that changed, but one of us always suffered high latency as a result.
I couldn’t understand why there was no LAN support in the game, given gaming’s long history with LAN multiplayer: local networks were the preferred way to play together before broadband and stable internet connections came in. Plenty of other games – Baldur’s Gate 3 for example – offer LAN multiplayer as standard. So I went online to see if I was the only person having the problem. I was not.
“How difficult would it REALLY be for the devs to enable LAN support on multiplayer?” one poster on Reddit asked in 2022, two years after the game’s release. “The rubber banding is so bad it makes me not want to play on very decent internet connections…”
Meanwhile on the Obsidian forum, again in 2022, a reply to a similar thread read: “This has been an issue from day one. I have posted about it here and on other forums. I have not ever seen the developers mention anything about fixes or work arounds for players attempting to plan LAN or from the same internet connection. It’s pretty sad really. In my household we have 5 copies of this game, and we are unable to play it together because of the lag and terrible performance when trying to do so, from the same internet connection.”
A lack of LAN support in Grounded is a prevalent enough problem for me and others that when Grounded 2 was announced a couple of weeks ago, the main thing I was looking for was confirmation of LAN multiplayer support. But of course it never came, despite, again, Obsidian and Xbox underlining the game’s focus on co-operative multiplayer.
My worry reading Obsidian’s response to Eurogamer, about there being no LAN support in Grounded 2, is this has become the company’s stance on the matter – that Grounded 1 and 2 will simply never have LAN support. But why? Is there a fundamental issue with the game’s code that prevents LAN play, or is it something to do with Microsoft requiring an Xbox Live sign-in for security and validation reasons? Perhaps it’s just a way to push Xbox Live. Even if it’s all of those things, I still can’t see why LAN support should be an impossibility. It would help if Obisidian would explain.
As it stands, this is disappointing and a missed opportunity. I enjoyed Grounded and I’m excited by the sequel, but I’m put off at the prospect of high latency ruining my co-operative experience again.
Grounded 2 releases 29th July on Steam Early Access and the Xbox Game Preview program.
