Obsidian says Grounded 2 won't have LAN multiplayer either, and it's a huge shame

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.