Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is, as far as JRPGs go, relatively short. Not too short, mind—if you want to throw yourself into its endgame challenges, you'll be spending about 60 hours, and there's always New Game+ if you want to do the whole thing over again.
Given Sandfall Interactive's team size (around 30, not counting contractors and the like) one might wonder if that was a problem of budget. Not so, says Sandfall Interactive's portfolio director Matthew Handrahan in a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz. As a matter of fact, it was their intention from the very start.
"One of the things that's great about Expedition 33 is it really respects the player's time. It gives them plenty to do, and it gives them plenty of satisfaction, but it isn't arbitrarily 500 hours of gameplay. It's impactful because it's scoped correctly … It doesn't have any sense of bloat or extraneous things that are put there just to make it larger and larger and larger."
As a matter of fact, he reckons more games ought to be trimmed down a tad, stating that "Brevity should be more of a virtue in gaming. Something can be better by being shorter—something that's being discussed in film at the moment. Every film seems to be two and a half hours long, and I think most people are like, 'Can they all be a bit shorter, please? Because we have other things to do with our lives'."
Hear hear. While part of this is entirely my problem—I am subscribed to two MMOs, because I hate having both free time and money—I can't help but relate. Too many games are arriving at too fast a pace, all of them vying for your time, attention, and devotion. If it weren't my job to stay looped-in, I'd absolutely hunker down in my comfort zones and go nowhere else.
The studio's CCO and producer, François Meurisse, also toes this line. "From the beginning, we wanted to do an intense and short experience," he says, before relating to the 'too many games' thing: "As a player, there are so many great games out there that I want to experience, [and] what's important to me is the level of excitement and fun I get from a game, rather than how long it is."
Meurisse isn't convinced length should really enter the equation at all. "The value that players get from games does not align systematically with the length of the game. For example, one of my favourite games of all time is Inside, which lasts about two hours."
While I wouldn't dismiss that out of hand, as I'm sure Meurisse is aware (given his team priced Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 at a reasonable $50/£42) price does change things. Especially in a AAA industry that's staring down the barrel of $80 games. Sure, it's all about the experience, but most folks only have so much money to spend—and they wanna get the bang out of their buck. As far as ol' 33 goes, though? Mission thoroughly accomplished.
At around 60 hours' playtime, that's about seventy pence per hour of entertainment on my end, so there's no complaints here. Well. Maybe I'm a bit annoyed at Simon, but that's clearly a skill issue on my part.
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