Director Guillaume Brochu admitted that the undoubtedly successful Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 might not have been born if Ubisoft hadn’t stood «across his throat»
It was this boredom and the desire to «try something new» that made him leave his stable position at a large studio. And as a result, he started making a project that now claims the title of «Game of the Year». He started it without a team, without funding, and without a clear plan. He simply posted on Reddit and forums, looking for people who also wanted to create something great. That’s how a team of about 30 developers gathered — almost all of them either had no experience at all or were just starting out in game development.
The voice acting in Expedition 33 was also not done according to the standard scheme. Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who is now the game’s lead writer, had never worked on a video game before. She just saw an ad, sent in a demo, and that’s how it all started.
«I was like: ‘I’ve never done that, it sounds kinda cool’, so I sent him an audition», — says Jennifer Swedberg-Yen.
The director found the composer Lorien Testerd in the comments on Soundcloud. And the director himself admits: the whole story is the result of a combination of «great luck» and the fact that people were looking for creative ways out during the pandemic and were willing to take risks.
It turns out that the game was created by a team of young and inexperienced professionals — and even Brosch is surprised that it became a hit. This weekend, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 set a new record for simultaneous online activity with 145,063 players. And before that showed a million sales in just three days.
«We have, I think, an amazing team mostly of junior people but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented. Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years», — says Director Guillaume.
Surprisingly, such a dramatic success started with the first post on the Sandfall website: «Well we don’t have much to share now, other than what we shared on the main page, it’s the very beginning you know. But rest assured, this blog will be oh so amazing soon. Stay tuned».
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — a game with amateur beginnings, put together by enthusiasts from Reddit and Soundcloud, may now become a major hit in 2025. It has already become one of the second-highest rated game of this year according to Metacritic. Interestingly, it’s all because one developer got bored with Ubisoft — and decided to do something more interesting. By the way, Ubisoft is currently going through some hard times — after the acquisition of shares of their new studio by China’s Tencent stocks fell to the minimum of 2013.
Source: Dexetro
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