Despite Massive Achievement, Expedition 33 Developers Plan to Keep Team Lean

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a strong Game of the Year candidate, but also a huge sales triumph. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive disclosed that the game exceeded 5 million units in sales, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as quite a shock for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title achieving moderate commercial success,” the COO and producer explained.

A technical director remarked that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” for everyone relative to “our initial expectations and the final result of the field was. When the score released all staff members were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for the title including novel settings, enemies, and boss fights, reportedly will release in the next few months.

That said, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely the team will expand. We've built a talented crew with a strong creative director who has a great vision for this game plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the executive said.

Their team size generated plenty of debate when the game came out. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for a studio. Although the team is and was relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list reveals numerous contributors participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We will hire slightly more for sure should there be next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the executive commented. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio of a few exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as developers “is more to maintain the strengths that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know what’s at its core. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of what we built,” the lead programmer remarked. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

The lead programmer noted that the project originated from the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped that philosophy will be repeated with upcoming games.”