The article cites, from the developers, that the development budget for the game was under $10M, but take that with a grain of salt, because from SkillUp’s interviews with the team, getting Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox on the project was considered to be a marketing expense. Still, what they were able to do with so little is extremely impressive, and I hope that Guillaume Broche is correct and we’re going to soon see more games achieving a similar scope and budget with modern tools.
Sandfall, which said the budget for Clair Obscur was less than $10 million, conserved resources by avoiding the open-world trend. It borrowed an old formula for role-playing games, with beautifully rendered levels that are essentially large corridors and characters who are transported to a battle arena when they collide with enemies. The overworld map is a miniature version of the explorable realm, allowing players to feel the expanse without forcing designers to render every small detail.
…“You don’t need to fill your game with hundreds of hours of checklist content,” [Billy] Basso said. “People like more straightforward games.”
I kind of wish I could just make this into a sign, point to it, and show every publisher that laid off hundreds of devs making a $200M game in 6 years that no one wanted to play.
It’s funny how every group of developpers that leave ubisoft make peak afterwards, it’s almost as if ubisoft’s management was dogshit
Ubisoft generally has an extremely efficient pipeline for producing a lot of games that play extremely similarly.
true, they do release a lot of games, but given how well stuff like expedition 33 sells I think more focused, unique experiences might be a better strategy
What you need to do in that case is be prepared for lots of smaller games to not hit, and then eventually one will that will make up for all the experiments you did along the way. That’s how they and their peers used to operate before they all tripled down on those big hits and stopped making new IPs.
I really want to experience the narrative but I really don’t want a JRPG. They burn me out.
It has a very generous and flexible difficulty setting. Plus accessibility options. I started on normal and have been dropping down the difficulty whenever I gets too much, or disabling the skill based parts altogether. Then back up whenever a particular fight seems interesting, just to see how it plays out. It doesn’t penalizes you at all, as it should. It is truly a game designed to be enjoyed fully, it never gets in the way of the player’s enjoyment, and respects your time in ways no other jrgp does.
Thanks I’ll will try it eventually. It’s not the difficulty I’m worried about, it’s the sheer amount of combat.
There’s a story mode that auto-skips all the combat.
It’s short by JRPG standards, and if you find a deep enough sale, I’d say there’s still a good chance you’ll be into it and it’s worth a try. It’s very JRPG but also very different from others I’ve played at the same time.
