Once Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 players reach the game’s final act, all bets are off. Instead of being limited to 9,999 damage, players can instead now deal hundreds of thousands — even millions — of points of damage with their attacks. In a recent video interview with two co-founders of developer Sandfall Interactive, I was curious just how much damage the team was able to mete out when crafting Expedition 33.
“Actually, the [damage] counter broke at some point,” COO and producer Francois Meurisse said, referencing the on-screen indicator of how much damage an attack or skill does.
CTO and lead programmer Tom Guillermin didn’t want to get bogged down in the technical weeds, but essentially told me they had to tinker with the programming so that it could handle the high damage values the team was obtaining. “The lesson we learned from that was that when we take the craziest [character] build that people built within the team, you have to multiply that by a hundred, at least, to be sure that in the release era all the players don’t have issues,” Guillermin said.
So far, it doesn’t seem that players have had issues with their builds. Quite the opposite, in fact: the player base has found numerous ways to deal ungodly amounts of damage in Expedition 33. We’ve covered how Maelle is still a boss-erasing threat post-nerf, but her fellow expeditioners can make the damage counter soar just as high.
Sciel likely has the most potential to break the game. By taking advantage of the Pictos and Lumina abilities, the game’s way of boosting character stats and granting passive bonuses, the expeditioners’ damage can drastically increase. And through stacking Sciel’s Foretell and using her End Slice skill, which can deal additional damage based on how many Foretell were consumed during a fight, she can reach seemingly infinite levels of destruction. One player hit 40 billion in just 20 minutes, and theorized that Sciel could get into the trillions after hours of patient playing.
June’s Patch 1.3.0 added enemy health modifiers to Act 3, meaning players can double their foes’ health pools to make encounters more difficult. Enemy health can also be increased by a factor of 100 for the players who want a real challenge (or punishment). Because of these increased health pools, fun for some players means not just defeating an enemy, but breaking the game.
Guillermin says it’s all “part of the vision of the game” for the team. “Players outsmarting [us] with builds […] people engaging and taking ownership of the game in a way is, as developers, the best reward you can get.”
