In spite of Runaway Achievement, Clair Obscur Creators Intend to Maintain Team Lean
The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive GOTY candidate, but also a huge sales triumph. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that the game surpassed five million copies sold, this is despite its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.
The game's performance came as an unexpected turn for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create an enjoyable experience achieving moderate commercial success,” a key executive commented.
A technical director remarked the game's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” to the studio versus our early predictions and the final result of the field was. Because when it dropped the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”
This triumph prompted the studio creating a free update for players including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, reportedly is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.
Nevertheless, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the human scale that worked for this game then develop large projects one by one,” the producer added.
Their team size generated plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for a studio. While Sandfall was and is truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list reveals dozens of people participated; the French studio hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, for example.
“We will hire slightly more certainly should there be a future production surge down the line,” the producer stated. “Yet I picture more of a workshop with a small number of highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” He noted that their core belief as developers “is more to maintain the key advantages that led to this accomplishment originally.”
Although it's too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer said. “It's still premature to announce what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”
The developer added that the project started with the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we can continue as well for future productions.”