adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
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The developers was on Reddit looking for voice actors for the game way back in the day.
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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Original Title was "We Lost" - Development Build and Footage from 2019 Build Released Online
- Thread starter adamsapple
- Start date
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The developers was on Reddit looking for voice actors for the game way back in the day.
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adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Keep in mind, this started with a few people, 10, 12 guys, just fucking around in UE4. They didn't have a studio, publisher or external funding. That was the first 2~ years of this cycle.
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Agent_4Seven
Tears of Nintendo
Incredible story. That's how games should be made, just like in good old day before social media and other modern BS. I also completely agree with Swen, well said.
Power Pro
Member
That might not be reasonable as a standard way of developing, but for the scale of a game, and a new studio producing what seems like a labor of love, it's actually not bad.
It just shows that these huge publishers with loads of money can spend their money smarter. Having less people, and more actual talent in a studio can produce an outstanding title like this, and save them that big money they love so much. The way to make games for big AAA publishers right now is just throw as many people at it as they can, and say it's the biggest budget game ever, as if that makes it good, and we end up with uninspired, designed by committee games that don't make you feel anything. Plus, you have a bunch of talentless hacks in the studio who push their politics in a game rather than contribute anything of value, and that's how we've gotten to this point in a lot of modern development.
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
It then got turned into Sandfall.
That working title is still what the .exe is called to this day and i guess the whole studio decided to name themselves after their first game.
We are talking about building a studio, hiring basically nobodies in the industry and turning all that into an absolutely amazing game.
If it was an established studio taking 6 years, i wouldnt be impressed, but from literally 0 to hero in that time, without many experts on the team is very very impressive.
That working title is still what the .exe is called to this day and i guess the whole studio decided to name themselves after their first game.
We are talking about building a studio, hiring basically nobodies in the industry and turning all that into an absolutely amazing game.
If it was an established studio taking 6 years, i wouldnt be impressed, but from literally 0 to hero in that time, without many experts on the team is very very impressive.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
6 years is not impressive!
Sorry, but how long do you think its supposed to take to build a small team and get your first title out the door ?
Do you think this industry would have gotten built in the first place if it took teams more than the length of a console generation to get their first title out the door ?
Especially when they had to build their own engines, not simply pick the industry-standard model off the shelf and have no issue finding people already skilled at using it, no doubt professionally as well as personally.
I'm not attacking Sandfall by saying this. I'm happy for their success.
What I do have a MASSIVE issue with is the dishonest and/or ill-considered glazing of that success as some sort of revolution for the industry.
Because it's pure bullshit.
Guys with the experience and contacts of years in AAA taking 6 fucking years to put out their first game with liberal use of middleware isn't any sort of miracle.
6 years is a AAA timescale.
That requires significant, long-term, investment from somewhere. Seriously, good luck keeping a start-up afloat for that length of time without faithful backing.
We've had this before with projects like Fez and The Witness which the media ball-washes for their ambition and creativity whilst disregarding the fact that their over-extended production cycles make them singularly poor examples of what sustainable development looks like.
The inconvenient truth is if your model is to take this long, and you aren't backed up the ass by big business, you are never more than a single disappointment away from shuttering.
Its that simple.
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CrimsonTide
Member
Dont worry everyone
EA/Ubisoft will buy them for pennies on the dollar and they'll all be out of work in 2-3 years
EA/Ubisoft will buy them for pennies on the dollar and they'll all be out of work in 2-3 years
Hawk The Slayer
Member
I guess it was good that they went with the 33 Freemasonic number to boost its sales.
Magic Carpet
Gold Member
Thankful the word 'fall' wasn't used in the title.
Hugare
Member
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
IFireflyl
Gold Member
I don't know why you are so angry. Maybe you should take a break from the internet for a bit.
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Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Its real simple, get back to sub 3-year cycles or else nothing will have substantially changed. Because the product you get, and when you are offered it, correlates exactly with cost and dev-cycle length.
Don't believe me. Fine. I'll see you fools in 2031 when your next lotto winner turns up!
Don't believe me. Fine. I'll see you fools in 2031 when your next lotto winner turns up!
if you ever wondered how negative IQ looked like, here you are.
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
A 3 year cycle would not have allowed the game to come out as well as it did, in this case.
Now that they have a studio, publisher, a proper pipeline, future games wouldn't take this long unless they drastically scope them up.
Killer8
Member
This all seems really arbitrary. Why is 3 years the golden number exactly?
You seem shocked it took 6 years but it was also made by about 30 people, plus a bit of outsourcing on the side for QA and music production. The return on investment is what's important for keeping studios from shuttering. With a team that small, even 6 years is going to keep the budget low (and also makes it low risk for outside investment).
Budget is the function of the number of employees needing paid, multiplied by how long, plus any additional costs like marketing expenses. You're right, 6 years is AAA time - but they're usually made with hundreds of people (sometimes thousands) who nowadays literally take 2 hours of screen time to properly credit.
That is what bloats the budgets to the hundreds of millions of dollars, creating the very scenario of just one bomb and the whole studio goes tits up. Whereas Clair Obscur has seemingly produced AAA-like quality with a fraction of the man power and is likely enjoying a very healthy profit margin.
TheAssist
Member
They probably took on some state funding (there are special funds for gaming projects in a lot of countries) or lived of of unemployment benefits the first 2 years when they were just a handful of people fucking around (or both). Its not much but if you have some savings it will get you through the concept phase.
Of course you could not work like this with an actual studio and mouths to feed.
But if you take away these first 2 years that were probably spent learning the ropes of running a business, coming up with concepts, learning the engine, etc. its a 4 year dev cycle with an actual team and funding. Now that they have build up their skills, can work as a team and build up processes the next full game would probably take 4 years as well which is basically normalcy at this point.
This might very well be an outlier and even the video shows that there was a heck of a lot of luck involved. Business is all about getting rid of luck, risk and uncertainty, so this is not a feasible model to copy for the big or even the mid sized players in the industry.
But at the end of the day this is a feel good story and the story tellers of this world will ignore all the inconveniences to tell a better story. Be it to recruit new talent, to shame "big gaming" or for clickbait in general. It is what it is, at least we got a heck of a game out of it, so I'm good.
Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
I'd hope so! If given 3 years extra work-time if you can't improve your game questions need to be asked.
Maybe they can, and I hope they do.
You're missing my point: If you want more games like this, then the paradigm needs to be shifted towards more realistic development time-scales. Getting 6 years is a luxury that only a rare few will be granted.
Lets be honest, based on time-scale this would have gotten funded during Covid when the gaming bubble was at its fullest and money was relatively freely available. This leads to the obvious question as to whether even with the success of Expedition 33, would they get funded in 2025 for an equally risky project?
Because if not, while you will still occasionally see games like this, they'll become increasingly few and far between. An outcome I doubt will please anyone.
I think I've been absolutely crystal clear in directing my critique at the media response to the game, and not the game itself. But since it seems some troglodytes in this thread have the reading comprehension of a ham sandwich let me restate it again:
I do not begrudge Sandfall their success. My complaint is with the downplaying of the exceptional circumstances that have led to this success. Simply arguing that small teams should be funded for 5+ years to the tune of $40m+ to bring their idea to market isn't going to cut it when the people with the actual money to invest are unlikely to bite on it.
My issue is with the argument that this is a replicable model to revitalize the industry, when its evidently not a success likely to be easily repeated.
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
adamsapple
Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
Loomy
Thinks Microaggressions are Real
Grab 10 of your closest friends, then get 20 more. Come up with an idea for a cool AAA quality game made at the scale and budget of a AA game, and let's see how long it takes you.
This isn't a sequel. It's a brand new IP. There's a lot of prototyping, experiments, tests, and backtracking that happens in the first year or 2. Studios 10 times the size of Sandfall take 6-7 years to create a new AAA game with a new IP.
You're minimizing something that is objectively impressive, or at the very least - the expected norm. The only way things get faster with humans is if you get close to 24hr continuous development where a dev signs off, pushes their changes, another dev in another timezone signs on, checks out the branch and continues working on the exact same thing. That is a shitty way to develop something, which is why it's not done.
Hello Games has been working on Light No Fire for about 6 years now. And some of that work is based off what they've done in No Man's Sky.
Jinxed
Member
Guy started learning unreal engine out of nowhere on his own free time after his day at work then asked some of his buddies for help. Tried to find people on reddit, music composer on SoundCloud. Went through covid, small team of 30 or so people.
6 years!!! That's too long! 6 years!!!
6 years!!! That's too long! 6 years!!!
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RPS37
Member
I'm thinking Tate McRae
Buggy Loop
Member
Amazing story full of lucky strikes. Imagine making one of the best gaming OST in decades with a guy with no experience doing that. Guillaume Broche is insanely lucky to have found these peoples but also he shows he's an incredible director to pull this off from playing around UE to a full fledged game that shames all AAA studios basically.
We have one retard in this thread saying it took too long
We have one retard in this thread saying it took too long
Reizo Ryuu
Member
Yes 6 years is crazy, everyone I know that's worked on an indie project got anxious when they were about to reach two years, because after that time the initial investment has already been too big to scrap and they need to start shopping around for publishers.
Madjaba
Member
It took 6 years because the scale of the game constantly increased.
They had to evolve constantly in order to deliver the game we have today so that's not surprising.
Do people realize the amount of work it is to constantly adapt to a new engine (UE4 to UE5 for example), transitioning from music assisted by tools from working with an orchestra ? Founding a studio ?
What they did is simply amazing in this amount of time.
They had to evolve constantly in order to deliver the game we have today so that's not surprising.
Do people realize the amount of work it is to constantly adapt to a new engine (UE4 to UE5 for example), transitioning from music assisted by tools from working with an orchestra ? Founding a studio ?
What they did is simply amazing in this amount of time.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
To play devil's advocateAmazing story full of lucky strikes. Imagine making one of the best gaming OST in decades with a guy with no experience doing that. Guillaume Broche is insanely lucky to have found these peoples but also he shows he's an incredible director to pull this off from playing around UE to a full fledged game that shames all AAA studios basically.
We have one retard in this thread saying it took too long
, the point I could guess would not be the quality of what they achieved or the usefulness of the middleware that helped them get there without having to spend even more time with custom tools and engine (we are still talking about some industry veterans founding the studio not just like nobodies, but we have good people that used to post here that because music directors at studios like Arrowhead… were once smaller indies), it was more about is this the anti-AAA approach some journalists are pushing. This studio did not come out and boast that and called out all AAA publishers.For 2D and 3D animation a lot of people underestimate French specialised schools (and the output of the animation industry there) for it as well as the quality of their engineering schools for the École Polytechnique to lesser known internationally maybe but incredibly strong schools like Epitech for their CS curriculum (as a Southern European I am a bit accustomed that the competency in the area is undervalued especially overseas but
not always without blame with execution, public funds not always put to good use execution wise either).If we take small indies and GTA VI style productions out of the equation, the point is budget (compared to other games) and years to go through pre-production and production / release (speed of iteration) and their next title will show how they ultimately compare fairly as they will already have had an established studio (not counting they had to spend time setting things up would be unfair). Will their next title be relatively small budget and would it take them only 3-3.5 years to get it out on the market and still maintain quality and scope comparable to this game? Then yes not only it will be another great game, but it gets to be a model put on a pedestal for the AA and AAA studios to learn from.
It would also be unfair for other small to mid sized studios to be judged under the same expectations because once you have a non trivially small (mid single digits or smaller) group getting it budget for 6 years of work as a full time job is not easy either and requires a publisher and/or the state to invest in you (they did get public funding I believe, but might be wrong).
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Clear
CliffyB's Cock Holster
Listen up. I spent 3 decades in the industry from start ups to multi-nationals, so don't think you need to tell to me what it takes to succeed in the business. I know already and almost certainly better than you do.
If you spend 6 years working on anything you have no idea what the commercial landscape and market expectations are going to be by the time you ship. Typically compounding the need for re-factoring, pivoting, and adapting as your paymasters get more hands on in demanding you conform to standards and content they deem most likely to create a positive return on in investment.
Team size = burn-rate. The bigger the head-count the tighter the money tends to hang on because while you, the creatives, are chasing your muse they are watching the budget get used up with nothing sellable to recoup it.
You do get that's been standard practice for decades in the corporate space right? In fact in multinational development its practically unavoidable based on geography. If the team is in Europe, publishing is in the US, and QA outsourced to India or Asia, how do you think that's going to work.
I'm not minimizing, In fact if anything I'm emphasizing the remarkability of SandFall's efforts.
The point I'm stressing, in the face of way too many media reports saying "this is the future" , is that in likely 99 times out of hundred the same circumstances will not produce the same success irrespective of the talent involved.
Yes, and they have NMS to keep paying the bills in the meanwhile buying them autonomy.
Edit: As for a certain smooth-brain who's calling me "retarded" for pointing out that time-scale matters., I hope to God you never have / will posted criticising cross-gen development and how few big titles get released every year. Because I'm going to rinse you mercilessly about it.
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Doesn't seem at all surprising when the entire premise of the game changed. It used to be kinda sci fi at the early conception stages.
Donald mac Ronald
Member
Depending how quick you are. You can build Shepard team within hours, so it's doable. Certainly doesn't take years
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Correct.
Tis Tate McRae.
The original concept was based around some time shit.
And I guess in the original version the game starts when they have already lost to what would evolve into the Nevrons.
The project title was Sandfall (as in sand falls in an hourglass)
The exe. is still actually called Sandfall, I initially thought the devs were really lazy naming their project files after thier game studio cuz the next game is gonna be what Sandfall2.exe?
But its actually just the working title ended up being the name of the studio.
As for the new name:
viveks86
Member
Interesting! Really need to get around to playing it this year.The original concept was based around some time shit.
And I guess in the original version the game starts when they have already lost to what would evolve into the Nevrons.
The project title was Sandfall (as in sand falls in an hourglass)
The exe. is still actually called Sandfall, I initially thought the devs were really lazy naming their project files after thier game studio cuz the next game is gonna be what Sandfall2.exe?
But its actually just the working title ended up being the name of the studio.
As for the new name:
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
During Act 1 (Im not yet in Act 2) the name already makes alot more sense.
P.S
The fact this game lets me farm so early is a plus.
Im such a pussy I never want to reach a boss under leveled.......then you realize optional bosses exist and you are underleveled.
But with the dodge/parry system, all you need is time.
Im so down with this game, im taking my sweet sweet time going through it.
I havent been this invested in a game since like Control (hate if you want, the world building of Control was top tier).
Kataploom
Gold Member
Control is top tier to me as well buddy, loved that game. Actually that among other games at the time made me realize I was liking AA more than AAA, they're more focused and with games like this one it's pretty clear AA is gonna be the norm and AAA an exception for some franchises
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