We’ve all been there. You’re at the end of a game, you’ve done all of the side quests, you’re strong as hell, finally read to take on the final boss, confident you can finish this quest you started 30-100 hours ago. Only to find that the fight is a piece of piss because, whoops! You overlevelled yourself by too much. This was seemingly the case for a number of people in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and now the game’s lead designer Michel Nohra has expressed some regret for those who had that experience.
“The only thing I regret is not making it clearer that if you want the intended difficulty for the boss, you have to go beat it now,” Nohra told Edge in a recent interview (via GamesRadar). “Often, people don’t want to finish the game, so they do all the side content before finishing it, because once the story is over, you’re usually less motivated to do the side content. And that’s something I underestimated, which made people that wanted a challenging end boss fight feel a bit disappointed. I don’t regret doing it the way we did it, but [we could have] had more explanation about your choice [in Act 3].”
Part of this comes down to, in the opinion of lead programmer Tom Guillermin, being led by “humility,” simply because they weren’t sure if the RPG was any good. “And if it’s not, people may just want to see the story, and go directly to the end of the story. So it was a surprise for us [that] people were doing every single thing there is to do in the game before going to the final dungeon. We’re happy about that, but we didn’t see it coming.”
To be honest, to me it just sounds like Clair Obscur followed in a long lineage of games that let you overlevel before the endgame. And as a chronic side quest skipper, if I ever get around to this one, I’m sure the final boss will be enough of a challenge.
