Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Lead Writer Didn’t Approach It as an RPG, Treated It Like an HBO Drama
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an excellent role-playing game that has earned awards at The Game Awards and beyond. However, its lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, revealed that she didn’t approach the project as a typical RPG.
According to her, she wrote it as if it were a dramatic HBO series.
A Team Beyond the Gaming World
In an interview with Edge’s Knowledge newsletter (thanks Games Radar), Svedberg-Yen was asked whether the fact that many members of the Expedition 33 team did not come from the world of video game development influenced what the game eventually became.
She replied: “I think it obviously has challenges, because we’re new. [But] we were able to bring in our own tastes and our own perspectives that we’d built up through life outside of gaming, and bring the best of other worlds into the game.”
She added: “A lot of times, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. There are some things that [other] people wouldn’t even think about, but for us we can just [say], ‘Yeah, why not?’ and challenge each other.”
Svedberg-Yen explained that she has never really played video games and instead drew inspiration from TV series and books. “I love science-fiction and fantasy epics which have massive, immersive worlds and vibrant societies, so I took a lot of that and put that into the backdrop of the game,” she said.
She concluded: “I didn’t think of it as writing an RPG. I thought of it almost like writing an HBO drama.”
In other news, Sandfall Interactive revealed that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was developed for a budget of less than $10 million. This figure is remarkably low compared to the budgets typically seen in major video game productions.
