Deep Dive Into Expedition 33 | Official Xbox Podcast

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Games in this podcast range from E to M. Hello, and welcome to the official Xbox podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside Xbox, or inside my guest room this week. We've got a very special one, despite the setting for you today. We're going to be talking about a game I am personally incredibly excited for, one that we just got a great look at during the recent Dev Direct, but you know us, we want to dive deeper, and, so we are talking about Claire Obscur Expedition 33, and joining me today all the way from Montpellier, France, it is Sandfall Interactive's Creative Director for the game, Guillaume Broche, and the Art Director, Nicholas Maxson-Francombe. Welcome, both of you. Thank you, so much.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Thank you, and thank you for having us.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: All right, before we talk about the game, I would love to talk about the studio really quick. Tell us about Sandfall Interactive, the team that you've built there, and your mission.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, we have a grand mission. So our studio was founded actually five years ago now, in 2020, so it's funny because the game that we're working on, Clair Obscur Expedition 33, actually started as a solo passion project on my side while I was working in another video games company, and in the beginning, it was just for fun. I just wanted to make a turn-based game that felt new in the market, and in the beginning, it was a passion project, and just like as I needed to like more stuff, like I needed, for example, some help on the coding, so I talked to Tom, who is today our CTO and the Technical Director. Then I needed some help with the art, so I called Nicholas, and in the beginning, everybody was working for free, and it built kind of organically, and at one point we were like, okay, it's becoming something real, everybody leave your job, and we founded Sandfall Interactive in 2020. And yeah, today we are a team of about 30 living in Montpellier, France, mostly, and we also have a small team in Paris working on the cinematics, but yeah, it's very much a small team despite what it looks like.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I love that on the studio's website there's pictures of everybody on the team, and you also share your favorite games, so I'm particularly delighted to be speaking to fans of BioShock and Persona 3 and Final Fantasy VII here this morning, or this evening for you, and from the moment that we first got sight of Expedition 33 at the Xbox Game Showcase last year, look, I'm not going to play it cool. I've been obsessed with this game. I've been digging into all the content that you've been releasing over the course of the past year, and so much of that stems from the mood, the vibe that you've all set, the city of Lumiere, the Paintress, like immediately hits you like, whoa, this team is doing some really different stuff. So what can you share with us about this world that we're seeing in Claire Obscur Expedition 33 and the story we're going to be enjoying as we explore through these stunning worlds?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so I think from the start, when Nicholas joined, he joined around two years after I started working on my side, but I'm not an art director, so the art direction was really bad, in retrospect, but there was some hope, and we basically rebooted the art direction, and we knew that we wanted something that felt really unique, so the Belle Epoque, France, it's not explored that much. It's early 20th century in France. It's an era of beauty, and everything was very hopeful in this period, and we mixed that with some fantasy elements as well as some surrealism elements, and we got a unique mix today that is mostly thanks to Nicholas' crazy mind.

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: Yeah, we got some art deco as well in there, too.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, and for the story, we co-wrote it with Jennifer, who is our lead writer today, and we also knew that we wanted something that felt very fresh and never seen before, so we spent some time thinking about a cool hook which is this Paintress, making people disappear and everything, and really the hook came first, and then we kind of built everything around it. We built the characters and what is the relationship with the world they live in, because every year people disappear younger and younger, and you are playing as this expedition who tries to stop this cycle. We really wanted this kind of story that punches you in the gut every cutscene, so you can expect a lot of emotional scenes, and you will feel joy, you will feel sad, you will feel angry, we hope, and you will get very attached to the characters, hopefully, because we spent a lot of time here making them very, very compelling and also very different from the other games in this kind of genre that you can expect, compared to the usual JRPGs, which is much more Western in the writing and the story and how it's delivered.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, this is such an interesting mix, and we're going to get into a lot of that, and also that hook. That hook does get you right in the first minute of the trailer. I'd be dead in that world already, if you can believe it, I'm somehow -- I'm over 33. So we've got to see some tantalizing looks at the game during the recent Dev Direct, but, thank you, you've brought some additional footage here and we have the privilege of breaking some of it down, so let's get into it. Personally, I'm a big turn-based RPG fan. I love it when turn-based games integrate real-time elements. Valkyria Chronicles is an all-time fave of mine, going back all the way to the original Super Mario RPG, Guillaume, I don't need to remind you. Squall's gunblade had that well-timed tap of the shoulder button to crit, which I always loved. It was just so visceral. So Exhibition 33, I know, is integrating a reactive turn-based battle system, so we'll get into that once we get into battle here. But real quick, let's talk about the way Sciel is navigating the environment here. Is there a jump button? How does this world work, and how do you run around in it?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, since the beginning, we wanted a turn-based RPG that doesn't feel like classic turn-based, so even in the exploration, we wanted something that feels very modern, so it's really like it's full third person, and you can jump, you can climb, you have a grapple hook, which, as we all know, makes any game better instantly, and we spent a lot of time with, Nicholas, also, if you want to talk about it, but building every level to feel very, very different when you explore them in terms of art and gameplay. And yeah, most of the art for the levels come from the crazy man of Nicholas once more, if you want to say something about that.

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: Yeah, for per level, I was always trying to think about what could make each individual place unique, so it comes with color, it comes with shape, anything that really catches your eye as soon as you enter, so like, for example, the red grass mixed with the contrast of those white heads that you see on the ground or all those busts, and like, oh, there's almost like old toys that you find in the box, so it's just that kind of stuff that I was thinking of. And generally, it also goes like just trying to implement 3D assets that we've made and what can I use or take, which shape can I take from those and use into the environment, is kind of how I generally think of a level, and yeah, that's just about it.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Everything does really stand out, and I know we're going to see a couple of different areas here. Let's get into the battle here just a little bit, sort of those real-time elements and even just getting into the details. Now, I'm not going to lie. I slowed some of this down and looked at this footage over and over again. So I see with Lune, there's like a lot of depth to these actions. Obviously, you start with sort of the first level of just item and attack and skill, but then I see right there, it mentions Stains and how they affect skills. Can you just tell us a little bit about that?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so from the beginning, what we wanted, because it's what I love also, like in traditional JRPGs, is that they have very complex systems, progression systems, but also battle systems, and we really didn't want the game to just be a pretty face. We wanted it to be a game that feels like a real game, so every character has their own play style, and you can really play them in a lot of different ways, but they also feel very different from each other, and they all have their unique mechanic and their unique skill tree, so the stance you're talking about is a unique mechanic of Lune. Yeah, by the way, we say "Loo-nay" [phonetic]. I just want to make this official.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I got it now, thank you, yeah.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: And yeah, our unique mechanic is called "Stains," so every time she will cast a skill, she will create these Stains, and she can have up to four Stains at a time, and when she uses skills, she can also consume Stains, and if she consumes the right elemental Stains, this will amplify her skills by a lot, so her whole play style is trying to find combinations of skills that you can play around with and some good rotations to try and always cast some overcharge skill. We call overcharge skills the skills that are more powerful than they should be, and usually characters have their own way to overcharge their skills, and it's tied to the unique mechanic, yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And then Sciel, and please correct my pronunciation because I'm sure I got that one wrong, too. She seems to have a different set of options. Like right there, some fortune-telling is happening here.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so it's very tied to her backstory that you will discover while playing the game, but yeah, there is a lot of semantics about fate with Sciel, and it's reflecting here own unique mechanic, which is called "Foretell," [phonetic], so her unique mechanic, she basically applies Foretell stacks on the enemy, and she can then consume them to do extra effects on her skills, and this will also allow her to switch stance. She has three stance, Sun, Moon, and Twilight. Twilight is basically the ultimate stance, and as you consume Foretell, you will create Sun charges, and if you apply Foretell, you will create Moon charges, and once you have Sun and Moon charges, the card will fuse and will create a twilight card which will make Sciel enter the Twilight stance, and when you are in Twilight stance, you are overpowered. So the main goal of Sciel is to remain in Twilight for as much as she can.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Got it. So it seems like each character seems to have their own certain thing, Gustave with this overcharge, and so there's going to be something for everybody to master and something that keeps things interesting in battle. Is that sort of the idea there?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, exactly. There are so many ways to customize the characters and so many different ways to play them. For example, for Sciel, you can build her full support and berth [phonetic], and then it's less interesting to go in Twilight and more interesting to build Sun charges. There is one main way to play the characters, which is usually the easy way, and then you can find some crazy combinations and combos to play them completely different from what they are supposed to be played as. But yeah, definitely we spent a lot of time making sure that every character feels very unique and also feels very unique for each player. So when you will see, for example, someone playing Lune, you will think, okay, this person is playing Lune in a completely different way from me, and I think that's very cool, and that's what makes RPGs very compelling for me.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: That's awesome. Actually, we'll talk about the skill trees a bit, but can we just pause here on the victory screen? Because at the end, you get a report card on how you did, like kills, damage, dealt, if we parried and dodged well. Is there something that you're aiming for? If you avoid taking damage in a battle, you get a really nice bonus, something that would keep me invested even in a basic battle, so you're keeping track of a lot of stuff here. Is there something like that that you want to sort of aim for?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so we have a no-damage bonus on each battle, so when you win a battle without taking damage, you get some extra experience, which is always a nice touch, and yeah, the cool thing is that with our defense system it is very much doable to do any battle without taking damage, so even a boss battle, so we really expect some channel runners to try and do a no-hit run from A to Z because it is doable. I'm trying one right now and it's a lot of fun definitely to try and master every enemy pattern and try to get a no-damage bonus on every battle.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: All right, I know we also have footage of the skill tree. I love a good skill tree, and I would love to know just the team's philosophy. It seems that, first of all, would it be something where you're expected you're going to unlock everything, or you really are going to be like this is a great opportunity to customize and make it so that my Gustave or Maelle is a lot different than yours is, if that's what I want to do?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so the idea is that when you are playing the main story and most of the side content, you will have to choose in the skill tree, so you won't unlock everything naturally, but if you go deeper in the end game and you really max your character level, then you can unlock everything. When you're playing normally and you reach the end boss, you will have maybe two-thirds of all the skills, but then if you want everything, you can have everything in one play-through, and the way to do that is to grind to max level, but this will take some work.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: All right. In the Dev Direct, you mentioned luminous skills, which are passive skills, correct, that you can sort of connect together, and do some interesting effects? I'd love to hear more about those.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so this is core in our progression system and how you build out characters, so every character has pieces of equipment. They have one weapon and three Pictos. So the weapon comes with three passives that you unlock as you upgrade your weapon, and these passives you cannot learn them, so they are unique per weapon and usually tied to the unique mechanic of each character, but then you have what we call the "Pictos," and to make it easier to understand, you can kind of see it as like your armor pieces. They give stats, and they also have some unique passives, but these passives are more generic, so they can apply to each character, and these Pictos, you can equip them on any character. And the cool thing is that if you use these Pictos four times in battle, you will master the passive, and the passive is called the "Lumina," and once this passive is mastered, you will see it in your Lumina panel and you can then activate them without having to have the equipment piece equipped. So what's very cool is that when you play through the game, you will change your equipment a lot and you will get more and more Lumina, and at the end of the game, you have a full list of passives that you can either activate or deactivate, and this is where we really make some crazy combos, and this is where we expect players to really break the game, and we hope they break the game, because it's made for that, but this is really key to building your character, and making your beat [phonetic] completely unique, because, yeah, the combos are endless. We have 100 Luminas, I think, in the game, so yeah, you can really go crazy on the build and the combinations.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, I think we're going to be a month out watching YouTube videos that are like "the best build ever for Lune" and it's going to -- I'm already looking forward to that type of stuff. So one of the things about this menu that I particularly like is you get really close-up looks at the character models, and Expedition 33 has an incredible English voice acting cast bringing these characters to life, big names that we know in and out of video games, like Andy Serkis and Ben Starr, Charlie Cox, I think we're going to hear a lot of Charlie Cox a lot this year, and actors I recognize from other memorable performances, like Jennifer English, who played Shadowheart in BG3. So I'd love to hear about what the team was looking for, how you got such big names on this first game, and how it's all coming together.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so actually the story of Jennifer English and Ben Starr joining is a funny one because we went through Aside [phonetic], which is a company that does dubbing for video games, so we asked for some audition. In the beginning, it was just for the trailer for Gustave, and also the voiceover of the trailer, so we received like 20 different auditions, but it was blind auditions. So we didn't know the name of the people who sent the tape, and there was one voice that stood out, and I said, "Okay, this is a really cool voice. Let's take this guy." And later, our co-designer Victor, he listened to the tape and he was like, "Isn't that Clive from Final Fantasy?" Okay, yeah, that's Ben Starr. Maybe, okay, yeah, it's him, okay. So in the beginning, he was just in for the trailer, but after we chatted, we became friends, and just like his performance was incredible in the trailer, so we just told him, "Do you want to try Verso," which is also a very cool character. It was like, "Hell yeah." So yeah, that's how it happened. And Jennifer English was kind of the same. We received like 25 tapes for Maelle, and I was like, this is the one, and later they just told me, this is Shadowheart, and I was like, hmm, really? Okay. I didn't play Baldur's Gate that much, so I didn't know. I didn't recognize her. And yes, she's been, actually, super important to the project, so that's great. And for the Hollywood talents, let's say, Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox, it was actually an initiative from Kepler, who really wanted also to have some very, very strong voiceover and show that we cared a lot about the narrative, so it was really joint work of finding who would be the base voice for the character, so we made a list of recommendations, and then they reached out to their agent, and yeah, they just said yes very quickly, and they were super, super into it and asking tons of questions about the characters, the world, and everything. But we sent them enough material to get them interested and I think they liked what they saw, so yeah, that's how it happened.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It's all coming together. That's awesome. All right, now, Nicholas, we've been seeing these beautiful worlds. I know you all shared some video of this underwater level, but it's not a swimming level, which is great. Thank you for that, by the way. We have you here as art director, so I would be very remiss if we didn't dive deeply into that part of the game, into the art direction. So where are you drawing your inspiration from with these gorgeous areas that honestly don't necessarily look like stuff we've seen before?

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: Well, it's kind of a bit hard to explain, but I think most of the inspiration first is what wasn't in the game to start with. From my knowledge of playing many games already, I just wanted to kind of get out of the stuff that we've just seen a million times that goes from science fiction to space or to zombies, all that kind of stuff. Just wanted to kind of just get my head out of there and just kind of see what I can try to come up with. It was kind of original for me personally. So most of the research I've seen was ceramic textures, actually, just started with that, and then I was like, well, that can be pretty cool. There are some very original shapes that I kind of saw. Those shapes really inspired me to come up with the enemies that we see today in the game. Also, it helped as well for the environments. I mean, that was quite something that helped me to keep making all these original environments as well. So it was a mix of a paint vibe mixed with ceramics and then kind of going with crazy colors all over the place. And then also, I mean, it does help that there's an amazing story behind it, so that definitely helped me create the world, because originally I kind of was stuck in my Victorian Steampunk headspace for quite a while. You can kind of see it in my portfolio that I have on ArtStation, so it was just a lot of Victorian stuff, but the concept was early on more Victorian than it was now, like Bettybook [phonetic] mixed with Parisian Haussmannian stuff. So I tried to just get out of there, and also, in terms of the outfits, we tried to come up with something kind of quite unique, kind of asymmetrical. Again, it's something that someone has not seen yet. That's what I want to show.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yeah, mission accomplished. It's funny, all the things you mentioned and I look at the games that you have listed on the website, the games you're into, and it's like, yeah, all this checks out, you know, [inaudible 00:18:50] fan and The Order 1886 and BioShock and all that, so I love that you've sort of taken these inspirations and really made them your own. So over here we're looking, and we can talk about the art here and we can also just talk about the fact that there's a fully navigable world map that you first, I think, just first talked about.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Hell yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Yes, thank you, as old-school RPG player.

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: That is the big surprise for RPG enjoyers.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: So this is different than when we saw the close-up of running and jumping, right? You'll be navigating this differently. Tell us all about this.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, so for old-school JRPG enjoyers, this will be a classic, but really, since the day I started working on this project in Unreal Engine, I wanted a world map because I feel like it's such a cool thing that has almost completely disappeared from the face of the gaming industry. Nobody does that anymore, and for me, it was such a crucial and important part of what made the old-school JRPGs unique. It's this sense of traveling, and we are an expedition, and since the beginning, one of the key things is that we wanted the player to feel like they're going on a grand journey, and for me, the best way to do that is to connect everything via this kind of stuff, which is a world map. So for those who don't know, this world map, you have less control of your characters compared to the normal levels. You can jump, but you can walk around, you have some encounters, you can battle enemies. So in the beginning, it seems extremely, extremely big, and it is very big. There are a lot of levels to find. There are a lot of hidden levels to find, hidden bosses to find also on this world map. There are tons of secrets, and that's also what makes the world map super cool, because it feels like a completely different exploration game inside the game and really makes you understand how much you are traveling. It's so cool to see it in action today and seeing it modernized compared to the last world map I saw, which was 20 years ago, I don't know, so yeah. And then you have this cool feeling of when you unlock Esquie you can travel faster. Esquie would kind of be your mount in the game, and Esquie is a character that you unlock at one point in the game, and he's super cool, and you will mount him, and then he will be able to swim, then he will be able to fly as you unlock his abilities.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: There is Esquie.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, this is Esquie. He's so badass when he walks. This is my favorite animation in the whole game. It's just him walking like this.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Very jointy.

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: Yeah, props to our animators as well who have come up with these. They're incredible.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, absolutely incredible.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: And Esquie's a really powerful character, at least in the lore of the game, isn't that right?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: In the lore, he's the most powerful creature in the verse, but he's also super lazy, so he doesn't fight, but yeah, lore-wise, he's the strongest for the power scalers out there. And yeah, you see him running, so you can go much faster, and then you can see him swim, and you unlock these abilities as you go through the game, and you unlock sort of new areas, new things to discover, new levels to discover, and yeah, I think this is such a cool feeling that everybody would enjoy, I hope. I am so happy and proud of what the team accomplished with this. I think it looks really, really good. It took a lot of work to make it work in the realistic kind of graphics and also find the art style of this kind of format that is usually more stylized, so even in the proportions we have today, the characters and the trees and the assets are not real-life scale, but still, I think it looks really good, so yeah.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: It does, it does. Thanks so much, guys, for joining us today and just sharing the passion and sort of the motivations. You can just hear it in your voice, how excited you are about all these little features, and these are the features that, as an RPG enjoyer, you just love to hear about. And so is there anything we didn't cover here today that you'd love to share with the audience of the official Xbox podcast?

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, I think something that I'd like to talk about, because we don't talk about it much in the exploration, there is also a lot of NPCs to discover, and I know we had a lot of question about will there be towns, will there be NPCs, so yes, there will be. You will find merchants, and actually our merchant system is very cool. So most of our merchants are what we call "Gestrals," which you can see in the role. It's a unique race that live on the continent, and the cool thing is that they love fighting, so they will sell you some stuff, but if you want to see their secret stuff, which is usually their best item, you will have to fight them and beat them in a duel. So every merchant, you will have to beat them once to unlock the full inventory, and you will be able to discover their village, and you will have a lot of interactions there. And also, we have a lot of cutscenes in the game, but we also have a lot of dialogue in between the party members, so at any point in the game, you can decide to camp, and when you camp, you will go in this special camp place, and in this camp you can interact with all your party members, you can discuss with them, you can see some unique scenes between them, some fully realized cutscenes that are completely optional also. So yeah, hopefully the exploration is a delight for the players because we really enjoy making this world feel alive also, and it's not just battles and cutscenes.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: I love how you're like, "Oh, by the way," and then it's like, "Here's a whole other system." So I can't wait to see what we're all going to discover when we do get to play the game this spring. Of course, Claire Obscur Expedition 33 will also be coming to Game Pass day one as well, so I'm really looking forward to just a huge amount of people getting the opportunity, maybe even those who don't normally play turn-based RPGs but really like the way this game looks or all the things you've been saying, to check it out when it arrives. So unfortunately, that brings this episode to a close. Guillaume, Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us. It was great having you here and to share everything about the game, both in the Dev Direct and here today on the podcast.

GUILLAUME BROCHE: Yeah, thank you for having us. It was great.

NICHOLAS MAXSON-FRANCOMBE: Thank you. Yeah, it was fun.

JEFF RUBENSTEIN: Any time. Cannot wait to play. So wishing you the absolute smoothest ramp to launch, and hopefully we'll get to talk again sometime soon. That's it for this week's official Xbox podcast. We will see you next time. [ XBOX SOUND ]