Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs refuse to make AAA games because it goes against what made them great. RPG reaches huge milestone on Steam
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has surpassed more than 100,000 „overwhelmingly positive” reviews on Steam. Despite the huge success, the developers have no plans to expand the team.
More than three months after the release, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 continues to impress new players. The title of Sandfall Interactive studio recently reached an impressive milestone on Steam, which many other games could envy.
It's about reviews - there have been over 100,000 of them, and a whopping 95% are positive. As a result, the eye-catching phrase "overwhelmingly positive" appears on the game's Steam page. This is undoubtedly an amazing result.
Perfect team size
By the way, we also learned a bit about Sandfall Interactive's plans. Considering the huge success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, we might expect that the team will now start to expand. However, it turns out that this will not happen. Lead Programmer of the studio, Tom Guillermin, conveyed that the current size of the team is entirely sufficient (via VGC).
I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team. I’m not sure how big ‘an ideal team’ would be, but when it comes to making a full-priced turn-based RPG, I believe that the team we have now is just the right size.
The CEO of the studio, Guillaume Broche, emphasized that although the developers received support from external partners, the main team working on Expedition 33 was relatively small. To illustrate, he stated how many people were involved in specific elements.
We had five people working on environments, two on the story. And I think, around three to six people worked on the cinematics. The music was done by four people.
Broche also emphasized the importance of choosing the right people. Over 200 job interviews were conducted, during which the focus was on young and ambitious talents rather than experienced veterans. Some of the hired folks were just starting their career in game development.
At the time, our VFX artist and character designer had both just graduated from college, and this game was their first job ever. Since they had very little experience working, they also didn’t have many existing notions of what work was supposed to be like, which I think I was a good thing, because they managed to adapt to our peculiar work style.
The creators of Clair Obscur suggest that nowadays, the AA direction seems to be the perfect solution for game developers.
As development costs keep going up, I think we'll see more companies like ours making AA games. In reality, there is another studio in France that doesn't want to grow too much in terms of developers and focuses on creative and risky proposals: Sloclap, the creators of Rematch and Sifu. In this sense, the industry should consider AA more and not rely so much on huge projects with budgets exceeding 150 million dollars.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PC, PS5, and XSX/S. The title is also available on the Game Pass subscription.
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Author: Martin Bukowski
Graduate of Electronics and Telecommunications at the Gdańsk University of Technology, who decided to dedicate his life to video games. In his childhood, he would get lost in the Gothic's Valley of Mines and "grind for gold" in League of Legends. Twenty years later, games still entertain him just as much. Today, he considers the Persona series and soulslike titles from From Software as his favorite games. He avoids consoles, and a special place in his heart is reserved for PC. In his spare time, he works as a translator, is creating his first game, or spends time watching movies and series (mainly animated ones).
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