Storing your stuff in a video game can actually feel good — in Grounded
The new survival game from Obsidian Entertainment, Grounded, is awesome. It does a ton right — from brilliant art design that immerses you in the experience of being 1/10th the size of a blade of grass, to solid base-building that encourages fast, creative design and construction.
As much fun as I’ve had so far with Grounded, and as excellent an entry as it is to the base-building, survival genre, you know what it does the best?
Storage. Inventory management. Chests and workbenches. You know, the exciting parts of video games.
The screenshot above is from Satisfactory, not Grounded. But take a look… Aw yea… 12 industrial storage containers connected by conveyor belts? Forget graphics, forget physics, forget story… storage management is why we play video games.
Grounded Makes Each Part of Actually Playing the Game Feel Good
As you play Grounded, it’s hard not to see all the ways that the developers and designers chose to make the work of playing the game actually fun. And survival games necessarily have a lot about them that feels like work.
Games have ‘verbs’ — the specific interactions players have with the game-world. In classic Mario, your verbs were mostly left-and-right plus jumping. In Call of Duty, you’ve got sprinting, knifing, aiming-down-sights, throwing, sliding, using the minimap, etc. Recognizing what a game’s verbs are and reducing friction to using them (and making them legitimately fun to do) is the mark of a great development studio.
It’s just comforting when developers think about how a player’s time is going to be spent in a game, then make sure those individual seconds feel good. And Obsidian has done a lot to make Grounded feel good to play.
A tiny example? If you place your bedroll in the wrong place, it’s not there forever. Just press ‘F’ to relocate it. Same with all your workbenches and house cosmetics items. Is Grounded the first video game to do this? No. But it’s still an excellent choice.
Inventory Management and Storage Is Fundamental to Many Video Games Now
One verb that is undeniably huge in many games today is walking-around-and-collecting-stuff. Some games have a crazy amount of stuff for you to find and gather. And what do you do once your inventory is full? Another crucial verb: drop-it-all-off-in-your-chests.
In almost every other game like Grounded, managing the stuff you’ve collected and finding a place for it all is a chore. Whether it’s 7 Days to Die, Minecraft, The Forest — all superb video games! — they still force you to open a chest, transfer the stuff, then close the chest.
There’s a trope in survival and base-building games: stacking identical items. When you’re out in the world, you might collect a stone. That stone takes up a slot in your inventory. If you pick up another stone, it doesn’t take up a new slot, instead it stacks. If you come across a stick, you take up a space in your inventory, but can add several more sticks to your stack until a new slot gets taken up. It leads to inventories that look like the following screenshot:
The screenshot above is from Minecraft — the top half is a chest & each of those 54 different grid squares holds a different item. Since you can only hold 27 items in your personal inventory at a time, you’re constantly schlepping your stuff across the world and dumping it in chests. Chest organization is entirely up to the player, so it’s not uncommon to see hodge-podge arrangements like the screenshot above.
The screenshot below is from 7 Days to Die. Their inventory and chest management looks different but feels nearly identical to Minecraft. Again, you collect “stacks” of stuff but ultimately have to put it somewhere.
You can start to see how it can get confusing. Numbers, icons, spaces, grids. And you can’t just ignore all the stuff you collect — you need it to build your base, your tools and your armor!
Sure, as these games evolved, they added ways of adding and removing items from your inventory more rapidly. A click to transfer one object, a different click to transfer half the stack, a different click to transfer all the stack at once. These small quality of life improvements are wonderful, but still require that you remember which chest is the right one, open the chest, then navigate through your inventory to do the clicking.
Some Video Games Mistake Time Spent Doing a Thing with Time Spent Having Fun
Games that include base-building, community-organizing, and defense all end up including resource-gathering. Want to build a wall? You need to go harvest 5 Stone. Want to build a weapon? You need to go harvest 6 Iron and 3 Coal. Want to build an oxygenator that restores life to the desiccated planet you’re terraforming? You need 4 Iridium.
But too many games make a bad call. They forget that the time it takes to transport, deposit and organize the resources you need for advancing the game isn’t time spent enjoying the game. I’m not trying to suggest that every moment of a game should be sheer joy —overcoming the challenges and obstacles standing in the way of our goals is what makes a game worth playing. But identifying the tedium and reducing its potency should be the aim of a developer.
Storage and inventory management is, necessarily, a time-sink. It’s simply a part of the game, like walking around, that isn’t a part of the fun. But remember when Saints Row IV just let you fly around and jump super-high because walking is lame? Or remember when Spider-man let you web sling anywhere and everywhere in NYC because that’s way more fun than walking and running?
Well, Grounded hasn’t managed to make inventory management fun, but it has reduced all the barriers to it being a tedious waste of time. And more games developers should take note of what Grounded does so well.
Why Storing Stuff is So Fast and Easy in Grounded
What Obsidian Entertainment did right with Grounded is allow the player to look at a chest and press and hold the ‘use’ button to transfer items into the chest. All items you’re carrying zap into the chest if there’s already at least one of those things inside the chest. So if you’ve previously put plant fiber in the chest, you’ll automatically transfer all the plant fiber you’re carrying into the chest.
Bam. Thanks to this choice on the part of Obsidian’s devs, returning from an excursion takes moments to recover from, rather than several minutes. You just walk down the line of your chests, press and hold ‘E’ and watch your inventory empty out.
And that’s not all. In Grounded, if a storage chest is near a workbench, you can just build new items at your workbench using the stuff in your chests. You don’t have to check the recipe, go grab enough Gnat Fuzzes and return to the workbench. You can just have your workbench automatically draw the necessary components from nearby chests.
And even that’s not all. In Grounded, plant scraps can become rope, and rope is a necessary ingredient for lots of stuff. Imagine you look at the recipe for your new armor and see that you’ll need 3 rope. You have 1 in your inventory and 1 in a nearby chest, but that’s still only 2. But you have plenty of plant scraps.
Rather than walk over to your plant scraps chest, pull them out, go into your inventory, build a rope, put the plant scraps away, go back to your workbench and build your armor, there’s a faster, easier way: the “build component” button! In Grounded, if you have the component resources for a part of your current recipe, they just get made for you. And since you can just draw ingredients from your chests automatically, you can instantly build the parts you need.
I know this all sounds minor, but the beauty is that it is minor. Inventory management, chest organization, tediously hauling crap from one chest to the workbench and back again isn’t fun and it’s not how I want to spend my time when I play a game. And so Obsidian Entertainment, in developing Grounded, said, ‘So don’t do it, then.’
Grounded Lets You Spend Time Actually Playing the Game
Many other games don’t grease the wheels of similar inventory interactions, and although I love those games, the difference is radically different with Grounded. Organizing chests, maintaining my inventories, keeping track of what goes in which chests, spacing out my chests just right so that I don’t accidentally open the wrong one, that’s all annoying tedium. And I don’t have to do it with Grounded.
Instead, I can dump my stuff, build a few more arrows and bandages, and go back out and start hunting ants and grubs while hiding from gigantic spiders— because that’s actually fun!
The Devil’s in the Details, but They’re All That Matters
Letting you dump your stuff into chests automatically, having workbenches draw from nearby chests, auto-completing components for a recipe, these are minor things. I’ve played a dozen hours of Grounded, and all these Quality of Life improvements have probably saved me… what… 30 minutes?
But that’s 30 minutes more that I’m out there, exploring their lovingly crafted world, admiring their fantastic sound design, running for my life from a farting beetle. It’s 30 minutes I’m not spent frustrated by the mechanics and instead actively helped by the mechanics.
I love Obsidian Entertainment’s newest installment in the base-building, resource-gathering genre, and I hope many more developers and designers pay attention to the care the developers of Grounded gave to reducing the time spent doing boring things without sacrificing investment in the core gameplay mechanics.