In the months since the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developer Sandfall Interactive has been seeing quite a bit of praise for its debut title. One of the major reasons for the praise has been the fact that the RPG doesn’t really pad things out. Rather, its story is a well-paced one featuring interesting characters and vivid locales, along with optional side-quests and other fun things to do in the world.
In an interview with Automaton Media, creative director Guillaume Broche spoke about how keeping the scope of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 narrow helped its development and critical reception.
When asked what the already content-packed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would look like if Sandfall Interactive had unlimited development resources, Broche said that the studio likely wouldn’t have radically changed too much of the game. He noted that having limited budget and resources ended up helping the studio in narrowing the game’s scope so that its core elements could be as refined as possible.
“I don’t think we would have wanted to radically add unnecessary content or change the overall scope of our game though – I think part of the reason some fans enjoyed their time with our game was how we tried to respect the players’ time by not artificially padding out the game time excessively,” said Broche. “In some ways, having a limited budget and resources is helpful to narrow down the scope of a title and distil the vision to the core elements that make it great, and maybe having unlimited scope and budget would’ve made it a less engaging game for our players. It’s hard to know!”
As for what decision led the studio to announcing a major content update for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Broche noted that it happened because the studio wanted to thank its fans for the positive reception that the game has gotten. This means that the studio started working on the free update quite early.
“We were overwhelmed with the support from players since the game released, and we decided early on that we wanted to think of a way to thank them for their support,” he said. “That was one of our first considerations once we’d seen the game resonate with fans – how can we celebrate this new community that formed and give them something new? So, we wanted to work on a free update since then, something that introduces new content that fans should enjoy – new costumes, challenging new boss battles, a new playable environment, and more.”
This major update was announced earlier this week, and is slated to come to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S at some unknown time. Along with the new content, the update will also bringing in more localisation support for different languages, including Indonesian, Ukrainian, Latin American Spanish, and Turkish, among others.
For more details about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, check out our review. Sandfall Interactive also recently celebrated a major sales record for the RPG, confirming that 5 million copies have been sold worldwide.
