In spite of Runaway Achievement, Expedition 33 Creators Aim to Maintain Team Lean

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY candidate, it’s also a massive commercial success. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner announced that this title topped five million copies in sales, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite a shock to the developers. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title garnering moderate sales results,” a key executive explained.

A technical director noted the game's Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the team versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. When the score released all staff members was screaming and jumping. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in Sandfall developing new free content for the title featuring fresh areas, adversaries, plus epic encounters, as announced is coming sometime soon.

However, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. We've built an excellent group guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for the project and also for new ideas. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that worked for this game then develop one big game after another,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall sparked plenty of debate upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, viewed the development group as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was indeed a small team next to major studios, a quick look at the game's credits indicates numerous contributors worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, as an instance.

“We will hire a little more definitely should there be a future production surge in upcoming years,” the executive commented. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier of a few really talented people capable of producing collective masterpieces.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “aims to keep the successful elements that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to the DNA of studio through compelling worlds and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

They mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from the creative director pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”