OK so I don’t want you to suffer through a 1 hour 45 long interview with french youtubers so here is the interesting tidbits I gathered listening through it:
Interview with Creative Director and CEO Guillaume Roche and Alan Reynaud lead character artist
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In the office, the game is called either “Expedition 33” or “Clair Obscur”, but also shortened to “Expe” for ease of use
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In Japan, they learned that they can’t pronounce Expedition 33 so they are calling it “something 33” in japanese (Director joked he was going to make a special cover with Something 33 written in japanese)
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A lot of stress and uncertainty were felt in the team when Oblivion Remastered was released. They were asking themselves if their game could compete with Oblivion. They were aware of the release a bit in advance but not by much it seems
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When they saw the Metacritic score, they all were relieved
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They had internal challenges and the director said that for him, it was a tatoo for a 93 rating on MC, which the game is hitting right now on Xbox. Apparently, members of the team had made some wild bets that they now have to fulfill…
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The team has been receiving a lot of messages since the release, some really moving and personal, some fans said the game helped them, especially at a moment when they were feeling down. They’ve got a space for sharing these messages on their Discord server
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The director said that they are still in denial about the success of the game
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It was first and foremost a passion project for him and the team, everyone was onboard from the start and motivated
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He didn’t tell what their internal sales goal was, but said that at 2 millions, their goal was shattered supposedly multiple time over.
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The director is humble and said that the GOTY nomination (because everyone in the team is aware of the online discussion) would be a “bonus”, like it’s cool but that’s not something they are thinking too much about
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The director feel satisfied but he thinks they could do better. Now, he wants people to know that it wasn’t luck, that they could do it again.
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They don’t have plans for updates or DLC yet. They are still taking it all in, looking for feedbacks online
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Inspirations : the director like Souls game, especially Demon’s Souls that his older brother bought on PS3 as it was still a niche title full of mystery on release, Devil May Cry (3 4 V), Lost Odyssey (because it’s a JRPG with a realistic artstyle which is what they were going for for Expedition 33). Also, a book he mentioned : La Horde du Contrevent (The Counterwind Hord ?) (which is a modern french Sci-fi book with insane writing that is untranslatable because it’s based on how words sound in french). It’s important because it tells the story of an expedition that travels against a mysterious wind in a post-apocalyptical-decaying world and their objective to find the source of the wind, which is similar to the expeditions in the game and the mystery around the paintress
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The director started learning Unreal Engine on the side in his free-time while working at Ubisoft as much as 8 hours a day on top of his day job. He admitted humorously that he has a “toxic relationship” with Unreal Engine as it became an obsession since he started learning and playing with it
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He was more of a project manager / planner at Ubisoft, he wasn’t doing any work on the games themselves
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He said it was a great experience working at Ubisoft, “a lot of talent there”
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Funny anecdote: the first project he worked on UE that he named Sandfall, because it was about limited time and the hourglass was the image that came naturally to his mind, is the same project that they shipped. His first ever project in UE is the one that is in the player’s hands.
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Team is mostly composed of juniors with some seniors coming a bit later during development Juniors were all motivated and mostly learning stuff on the fly. For most, even the director himself, it was their first game project ever
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They had problems with collisions on the world map at some point and had to get all the team to play the game, to find and fix as much as possible. Sometimes, it was a collective effort, members of the team helping each other.
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All the team members are talented but they specialized while working on the game (someone had to make all the hairstyles for all the characters, for example)
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The baguette trailer was made as a joke by one member of the team who added baguette and beret to Gustave. It was then decided to make a trailer as a meme to promote the game
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Work was fluid because of the size of the team. It was easy to work and get feedback with people working in the same room. One example is a decision about the use of some new software for Mocap a few weeks before starting the sessions, which is a turn-around that is almost unfeasable on a bigger project
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One of the hosts mentioned Achievements on Xbox, as some statistics seem to show that people played the game 4-5 hours on average on Xbox. They both said they weren’t looking at these stats but were kind of surprised, supposedly it’s people playing the game with GamePass. The director said he used Game Pass to try some games, so to him, it’s probably people trying the game
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Difficulty modes were debated in the team. That’s why they’ve added a Story mode with more forgiving Parry window. Normal and Hard have the same Parry window, only the damages dealt and HP of the enemies change. The director was in favor of only one difficulty mode but they saw in QA that some players were dealing from 400 to 20000 damage depending on how good they were.
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The mini map was also debated, as in QA, some players reporting difficulties to find their way, but they made some changes to the lighting to help with that. They wanted people to not be distracted by the mini map so they could focus all of their attention on the environments and scenery.
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It was really easy to work with Kepler, their publisher. They internally pushed back the release of the game a few times when needed. No questions asked by Kepler, as they were both focusing on making the best game possible
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No crunch at all, except the overinvestment people made by themselves. The character artist said he had to fix Gustave model before a trailer was shown to the public, but he wasn’t satisfied by the other characters models too so he redone all of them at once, because he felt it had to be done. The team were going for a no crunch culture and Kepler, as most of the investers were indie devs themselves, were okay with that
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At the beginning, the director started with some assets he could find online and it was easier to find Steampunk style assets for what he wanted to do so that’s why he started with that style. When the project took form, they scrapped all of it for the Belle Epoque, french esthetic the game is now known for
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The scope of the game was still small for the team to manage and they felt like they had done all of what they could do Bigger teams have their own pros and cons. They don’t want to be bigger or do open world games. The director said he hates open world games, although he really liked Zelda Breath of the Wild but after having two Switch consoles breaking down on him, he never touched the game again.
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They have a small mocap studio in Paris (all the mocap was done by 2 people apparently with 2 tech assistants), they also had the help of a small team in Korea for work on combat animations (they could not find any french team specialized in combat animations) and a QA team for testing closer to release
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They started to work on UE 4 (4.16) and ended on UE 5 (5.4). It was not seemless to transitioned from UE 4 to UE 5 but they did it because they could
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Discussions about a movie adaptation are at an early stage (obviously)
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They are planning Live performances with Lorien Testard, Alice Duport-Percier and an orchestra probably this year. Live performance at the Game Awards is possible but they are not talking about it yet.