If you’ve read my review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you’ll know I loved it. It’s pretty handily my game of the year so far, and an all-timer RPG besides. It’s a hugely impressive piece of game magic, and I’m certainly not trying to diminish that.
However, the culture being what it is, I keep seeing the game’s quality weaponised against the state of game development in general. Even celebrations are often accompanied by some variation on the phrase “made by just 30 developers“. It’s good to be impressed by things! I was impressed too. And I generally agree with the sentiment that game development has become untenably bloated. It’s a very tasty narrative, but the figures are a bit sloppy. No need to listen to me, anyway. The credits are actually very easy to find.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | Launch Trailer
In brief: Sandfall themselves are, indeed, around 30 people. I counted maybe 34 but there’s a few people pulling dual roles across writing, quest design, and so on. That’s amazing, no doubt. The story starts to look a bit different, however, once the bulk of the credits begin to roll.
Firstly, there’s the eight-person Korean ‘gameplay animation’ team. If you’ve played any of Clair Obscur, you’ll know how vital animations are to its combat. Monsters feint and twirl in battle, pulling off elaborate combos that you’ll need to parry and dodge. While we don’t know specifically what ‘gameplay animation’ refers to, the only comparable discipline in-house on Sandfall’s side is ‘cinematic and performance capture’. So, I’m left to conclude that this Korean team are effectively responsible for a large part of why combat is fun in the first place, and a fair chunk of the game’s personality besides.
To those eight animators, add the dozens on dozens of people that worked on localisation, QA, and voice production work. And then there are the 30-plus musicians that worked on the soundtrack, including a nine person choir. As far as the in-house Sandfall credits for music go, only lead composer Lorien Testard, three vocalists, and the audio and music lead designer are listed. Again: I’m absolutely not suggesting Sandfall or anyone else is telling porkies or burying talent here. I only bring this up to say that, even just accounting for the music that’s so vital to Clair Obscur’s essence as a work, we can effectively double that ’30 people’ narrative.
I’m conscious that this all reflects a tendency in UK and US reporting to minimise contributions from outsourced workers and support studios in East Asia and elsewhere. In many ways, this is playing right into the industry’s preferred narrative. A few years back, People Make Games reported on the AAA industry’s habit of “buying crunch overseas”. I’m not suggesting Sandfall themselves are doing anything like this, of course – evidence points to the contrary, in fact. And in many cases, news writers on a time crunch are simply repeating whatever line has been accepted as common wisdom, rather than deliberately obfuscating the reality. I can understand why these catchy claims spread so quickly.
Once more: if Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made by 500 people, it’d still be an incredible work. It has the good game sauce, and clearly came from a place of love, inspiration, and the desire to tell a story. Doing math equations with talent and resources is a phenomenally boring way to judge art. But celebrating the wrong things – or the right thing with the wrong information – always feels a bit hollow to me. So, don’t skip the credits.
