Deep Dive Into Expedition 33 | Official Xbox Podcast

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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 Clair 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** (0:45)
Thank you. And thank you for having us.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:47)
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** (0:58)
Yeah, we have a grand mission. So our studio was founded actually like 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 other video games company. And in the beginning, it was just for fun. I just wanted to make a turn-based game that felt new, you know, in the market.
And in the beginning, it was just a passion project. And just like I needed more stuff, like I needed, for example, some help on the coding. So I talked to Tom, who is like today our CTO and the technical director. Then I needed some help with the art, so I called Nicholas. And like 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 some surreal. 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, this is very much a small team, despite what it looks like.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:07)
I love that on the studio's website, there's pictures of everybody on the team, and they also share your favorite game. So I'm like particularly delighted to be speaking to fans of Bioshock and Persona 3 and Final Fantasy 8 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, 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 Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and the story we're going to be enjoying as we explore through these stunning worlds?

**Guillaume Broche** (2:56)
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 when Nicholas joined, we basically rebooted the art direction. And we knew that we wanted something that felt really unique. So the Belle Epoque France is not explored that much. It's an 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 element.
And we got a unique mix today. It is mostly thanks to Nicholas Crazy Mind.

**Nicholas Maxson-Francombe** (3:37)
Yeah, we got some art deco as well in there too.

**Guillaume Broche** (3:40)
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 at this Pinterest, making people disappear and everything. And really, the hook came first, and then we kind of built everything around it, to build the characters and what is their 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 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 JRPG, this is much more western in the writing, and the story and how it's delivered.