There are still secrets in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fans are yet to discover, but its director won’t give any hints.
Speaking to Eurogamer about the game’s forthcoming update and the future of the Clair Obscur franchise, director Guillaume Broche discussed inspiration taken from the Final Fantasy games. While there’s a reference to Final Fantasy 8 specifically in the Gestral Village – with characters swapping “Double Dyad cards” in a nod to that game’s Triple Triad card game – overall Broche simply took inspiration from the general vibe of Square Enix‘s iconic series.
But are there other secrets yet to be uncovered? “There are, but I don’t want to say them because they won’t be secrets anymore,” Broche told Eurogamer. “Maybe they have been found, but I haven’t seen anything about it. There are still a few things, yeah.”
Fans have scoured Expedition 33 for hints and references, but it seems some of these weren’t intentional.
“The funny thing is [fans] found secrets that were absolutely not secrets originally,” said Broche. “And we are just like, ok cool. I guess that’s a secret!”
Ahead of the game’s release, Broche told Eurogamer he was keen for players to experiment with the game’s battle system to create “broken builds” and – as a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice speedrunner himself – he was looking forward to seeing no-hit runs of Expedition 33.
So did the community live up to his expectations?
“They are up to my expectations, which were very high,” said Broche. “They destroyed the game very fast. My personal speedrun record was broken in one week, maybe even less.”
The team did release an update to fix one particular ability that proved a little too powerful. But other than that, Broche is “very happy that people found crazy builds that even [he] didn’t really think about. It’s exactly what we made the system for.”
What he perhaps didn’t expect was for the community to discover his workings out. Fans uncovered a trailer for an early version of the game posted on reddit by Broche in a bid to find voice actors, which showed it in a very early state.
“It was like everybody entered my room and saw my underwear,” Broche joked. “I completely forgot that it was still accessible.”
“It’s funny,” he continued, “because I think that not often enough do we see real behind-the-scenes footage of games in general, like the very first prototypes that very often look terrible.”
Sandfall CTO and lead programmer Tom Guillermin added the discovery helped to “demystify” the early stage of a project. “I think it’s not that bad in the end that people found out,” he said. “It’s actually the same project in Unreal that we just upgraded iteratively and in the end that’s the game people get to play. I think demystifying that great games are not great from the beginning, it’s maybe good for the industry and also for the hobbyist as well.”
Sandfall Interactive is set to release an update to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 soon, adding new quality of life options and new story scenes offering “a bit of whee and a bit of whoo”.
