Veteran Game Developer Claims Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Altered His Perspective After Sandfall’s Junior Team Took “Shortcuts” for a AAA-Like RPG Experience

Last year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 proved that a studio outside the typical AAA realm could create a game that not only competes with but may even outshine the efforts of larger, more established developers. For Adrian Chmielarz, a seasoned game developer with 34 years of experience and currently the creative director of the RPG shooter Witchfire, the fact that the relatively inexperienced team at Sandfall Interactive managed to bring Expedition 33 to life is nothing short of astonishing.

“Last week, I discovered that the team behind Expedition 33 brought on a lot of newcomers, people who had never made a game before,” Chmielarz shares. “Now my perspective is completely shaken, and I’m at a loss.” While there is some experience within the Sandfall team—like creative director Guillaume Broche, who previously worked at Ubisoft—many core team members were quite new to game development.

“This game looks AAA to me; it’s phenomenal in every way,” Chmielarz remarks. “It features a rich story, a solid development process, engaging gameplay, and impressive visuals and sound. It’s a very cohesive product. Then you find out that the core team consisted of just 30 people, half of whom were first-timers, and I’m left thinking, ‘I don’t know what to believe anymore.'”

Chmielarz’s journey in the industry dates back to 1992, but he’s most recognized for his contributions at People Can Fly, a studio he co-founded in 2002, known for cult classics like Painkiller and Bulletstorm, as well as contributions to several Gears of War titles. Now part of a studio called The Astronauts, he served as creative director on the 2014 narrative game The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and is currently in the same role for Witchfire.

The Astronauts is even smaller than Sandfall, and both studios utilize outsourcing. However, it’s the relative inexperience of the Expedition 33 team that continues to impress Chmielarz. “When you analyze Expedition 33 from a designer’s perspective, you see an incredible number of clever decisions that enable them to create a game that appears AAA, while actually employing numerous shortcuts,” he explains.

One such “smart decision” is that “enemies don’t have faces,” which significantly reduces the workload for animating those features. Then there are the cutscenes. “I couldn’t grasp how such a small studio could produce such high-quality cinematics,” he notes. “But upon closer inspection, 99% of these cutscenes are essentially theater plays, meaning the characters don’t interact with the environment: it’s just one character talking to another.” If characters don’t need to engage with elements like a chair in the scene, achieving the right look becomes much simpler.

Chmielarz emphasizes that Expedition 33 is “absolutely packed with clever ideas, but to implement these concepts, you first need to understand how games function. You need that experience to identify these shortcuts. Clearly, there are some exceptionally talented individuals at that studio who have discovered ways to make this game feel much larger than it actually is.”

Steam will always dominate over the Epic Games Store because players are reluctant to “cheat on [their] home library with another platform,” says the lead of Witchfire.