Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's lead says they messed up a little by putting a ton of great endgame content next to a final boss you can easily outlevel: 'We weren't sure if our game was going to be that good'
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a brilliant RPG with one wrinkle—the endgame scaling its touch skewiff. It's not bad, don't misunderstand me: It's just that if you're a completionist like me, you likely hit Act 3 and roamed around the overworld, ticking off all of your checklists, only to loop back to the final boss and flatten it like an artist with a bottle of turpentine, a paint roller, and a grudge.
The game's lead game designer Michel Nohra confesses that they might've gone a little astray, there, per an interview with Edge magazine for Issue 419 (thanks, Gamesradar): "The only thing I regret is not making it clearer that if you want the intended difficulty for the boss, you have to go beat it now."
See, while it's a safe assumption that Clair Obscur lets you keep playing after the credits roll, it's also a safe assumption that you're meant to do a little exploring first—more than that, Nohra explains, most players keep the final boss as a motivating carrot on the end of a stick:
"Often, people don't want to finish the game, so they do all the side content before finishing it, because once the story is over, you're usually less motivated to do the side content. And that's something I underestimated, which made people that wanted a challenging end boss fight feel a bit disappointed."
That's not to say making the game's final boss scale for completionists would've been good either, and Nohra agrees, saying that while he doesn't "regret doing it the way we did it," the game could've done a better job explaining to you that you're meant to tie up the main story first, then go smash your face against Simon later.
Lead programmer Tom Guillermin, on the other hand, tells Edge that this snafu was due to an excess of humility: "We weren't sure if our game was going to be that good. And if it's not, people may just want to see the story, and go directly to the end of the story.
"So it was a surprise for us [that] people were doing every single thing there is to do in the game before going to the final dungeon. We're happy about that, but we didn't see it coming." It's a humility that's echoed elsewhere in the interview—mostly, Sandfall's trying to make sure it keeps perspective after making one of last year's unexpected award-sweeping hits.
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