We won’t see a new game from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 studio Sandfall Interactive for a few years, it seems, but the studio’s leaders are confident it will be something “a bit crazy.”
Speaking with Automaton, Sandfall CEO Guillaume Broche reexamines the studio’s plans for its next game – only its second release after the breakout success of Expedition 33, which was largely made by a team of junior staff.
“It’s too early to say anything precise, but we had a lot of fun creating Expedition 33, and it’s a game that we all love internally, so we want to find this flame, this passion again for the next project,” Broche says.
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“Expedition 33 was quite a long project too. Especially for me, it was six years. For Tom it was five and a half, and for most of the other members it was between four and five years. That’s also why we want to let ourselves dream again and be creative again. We’re going to go a bit crazy.”
Don’t interpret that craziness as a massively inflated scope, however. Broche affirms that Sandfall wants to stay small. Currently, the studio has around 26 people, which he calls “more than enough” for pre-production on the next game. If they cracked open the Expedition 33 war chest and hired a ton of people to make a gigantic game, Broche reckons they’d lose part of the team’s charm.
“If we know we can’t do everything, we have to focus on what matters, and I think that philosophy is what made Expedition 33 what it is,” he says. “It feels very focused, everything has a purpose, and everything is made for a reason. It doesn’t feel like something too big for its own good.”
Earlier this year, Broche commented on the second album syndrome facing whatever game follows Expedition 33. Unbothered by sales comparisons or critical expectations, he said “we’re just going to do what we love again” as “we didn’t make the first game to please anyone” and that worked out pretty alright.
Sandfall staff have said as much since the end of the GOTY season that saw Expedition 33 showered in trophies. COO and production director François Meurisse likewise said the team’s next game will just focus on “what we think is cool,” not what’s expected to perform or, as writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen put it, “please a lot of people.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 leads call PlayStation killing discs a “sad decision” after buying boxed copies of their own RPG – “For us, physical was something special.”
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