Microsoft’s gaming division and publishing label Xbox has released several new high-profile, first-party games this year already, with more heading to Xbox Series X|S consoles and Windows PC later in 2025. Amongst those titles is Grounded 2 — the highly anticipated sequel to Obsidian Entertainment’s popular 2020 survival game hit, and the second of three games from the studio this year (February’s Avowed was the first; October’s The Outer Worlds 2 will be the third).
First announced during June’s big Xbox Games Showcase, Grounded 2 is slated to be one of the biggest Xbox launches and Xbox Game Pass titles of the year — though it’ll undoubtedly make you feel pretty small, given that it’s about surviving a park environment after being scaled down to the size of an ant.
The game releases on Xbox and PC in Early Access on July 29, which is tomorrow at the time of writing (here are its specific launch times). Notably, its official system requirements and recommended PC specs are available to peruse; I’ve listed them below (taken from its Steam page) if you need to have a look and compare them to the hardware in your rig.
| Header Cell – Column 0 |
Minimum |
Recommended |
|---|---|---|
|
OS: |
Windows 10/11 with updates |
Windows 10/11 with updates |
|
Processor: |
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Intel i5-8400 |
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X / Intel i7-10700K |
|
Memory: |
16 GB RAM |
16 GB RAM |
|
Graphics: |
AMD RX 5700 / Nvidia GTX 1070 / Intel Arc A580 |
AMD RX 6800 XT / Nvidia RTX 3080 |
|
DirectX: |
Version 12 |
Version 12 |
|
Storage: |
40 GB available space |
40 GB available space |
There are a few noteworthy highlights here, with the biggest being that Grounded 2 will play on hardware that’s nearly 10 years old like the NVIDIA GTX 1070 graphics card and the Intel Core i5-8400 CPU. Since those components make up the minimum requirements, you’ll have to turn down settings and accept an undesirable framerate, but hey — it’ll run.
It’s also indicative of the sequel being very compatible with and playable on (at least on paper) many older specs and PC configurations, though the RTX 3080 in the recommended section is a more demanding guideline for playing at higher resolutions, settings, and framerates than I expected to see.
Still, that card will officially be five years old in September, and if you’ve built or purchased a gaming PC at any point in the 2020s, I doubt you’ll have any trouble achieving strong performance with high settings. I’m also assuming these requirements were determined with things like Super Resolution upscaling (DLSS, FSR, etc.) and AI Multi-Frame Generation turned off; assuming they’re supported in Grounded 2, those technologies should give big performance boosts with little-to-no quality loss.
Another thing that stuck out to me is the fact that the sequel has a 40 GB storage requirement — fairly small compared to many other modern titles with expansive open-world environments, but also five times the size of the original Grounded that only needs 8 GB. You might need to get one of the best SSDs to expand if you were expecting Grounded 2 to be that small, but overall, it shouldn’t be hard to simply make room by uninstalling another game or two.
Note that if you’d like to see what components you have in your PC and check that they meet the game’s requirements, you can do so by typing “dxdiag” in the Windows search bar and running the dxdiag diagnostic tool that appears. Its System tab will display your operating system, CPU, RAM, and DirectX version, while the Display one shows your graphics card. To figure out storage capacity, you can simply look at your hard drives in Windows’ File Explorer.
Overall, Grounded 2 shouldn’t be difficult for the vast majority of PC gamers to run well, which is good news considering I expect many will be interested in playing it. Even at the start of its Early Access period, it will be a larger game than its finished predecessor, complete with a larger map, plenty of new options for crafting, base building, and character builds, the addition of ridable “Buggy” mounts, new bugs to encounter, and more.
If it’s anything like the experience that came before it, the sequel will likely be one of the best Xbox games and best PC games of the year, even in its Early Access state. The original Grounded was a huge success for Microsoft and Xbox, and also went on to perform well on PlayStation 5 as well.
You’ll be able to play it on Xbox and the Xbox PC app with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, with the option of buying it permanently for $29.99 on both platforms as well as Valve’s PC gaming client Steam. There’s also a $39.99 Founder’s Edition with extra skins and a digital artbook and soundtrack, along with a $9.99 Founder’s Pack upgrade for anyone playing with a standard edition or on Game Pass.
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