Game of the Year 2025 devs underestimated their work. „Most of us were aiming at around 80”
Before the release, the developers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 assumed that reviews of the game might allow it to hit a metascore of 80/100. In the end, they were „slightly” wrong.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is undoubtedly one of the biggest surprises of the past year. The game got rave reviews from critics and players, and it totally stole the show at The Game Awards 2025. Such success was not anticipated by Sandfall Interactive, which preferred not to overestimate expectations regarding sales and player and reviewer ratings.
Predicted score on Metacritic
The co-founder of the French studio and producer of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Francois Meurisse, spoke with Edge magazine some time ago. During the interview, he admitted that six months before the game's release, the developers assumed it might reach a metascore (which is the weighted average of critic reviews) of around 80/100 on Metacritic, although they ultimately hoped for a bit more.
We conducted some mock review six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80. So our official goal towards the end of production was to reach for 85 in MetaCritic, and we did some great extra work and focus in the last months to bounce the quality up. We were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 bar of Metacritic was really a great reward for the team. That's where things began to get a little crazy.
The art director of Expedition 33, Nicholas Maxson-Francombe, confirmed these words, adding that most of the team considered the game to be "quite decent" and were satisfied with the result, even if it did not achieve great sales success.
We were giving each other bets on the Metacritic score. I think most of us were aiming at around 80. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were pretty proud of what we did, but even if sales [had been quite low] we would have been happy.
Now we know that the developers somewhat underestimated their work, which boasts a score of 92 points on Metacritic (in the PS5 version). The player ratings there are even better, with an average of 9.6/10 (which is one of the best or even the best scores in the site's history). As if that weren't enough, on Steam, Expedition 33 achieved an even better result, with 98% of players giving the game a positive rating. Moreover, the title continues to record very good activity results (especially for a single-player game), helped by the publicity gained after The Game Awards 2025 and a new update.
SteamDB
Why such an underestimation?
The lead developer of Expedition 33, Tom Guillermin, explained the reason behind the underestimation of the final product's quality. A common issue is that developers get "tainted" by early versions of the game, making it hard for them to objectively judge their work. They see the rough initial project, which lacks things like voice-acted dialogues, start to come together, and it skews their perspective.
It's hard to evaluate how good a game is because one is influenced by the early versions they see. These are very rough versions, featuring mechanical speech synthesizers instead of voice-acted dialogues and similar elements.
Meanwhile, Meurisse added that one of his principles is "plan for the worst, hope for the best," which means he somewhat forbade himself from having too high expectations. Moreover, during production, the team made many pessimistic scenarios where everything went as wrong as possible (which shouldn't be surprising, given that even projects with large budgets and from much more popular genres have faced major or minor failures). Ultimately, however, none of these scenarios came true, and reality even exceeded their wildest expectations.
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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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