Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs love to see players "outsmarting" them with obscene builds that break the French JRPG wide open: "The best reward you can get"

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive says players racking up ungodly amounts of damage through broken builds is "the best reward you can get" as a developer.

Speaking to Polygon, COO and producer Francois Meurisse recalls that the damage counter for the French JRPG actually "broke at some point" during development, and it's a good thing Sandfall got on top of it. To make sure it wouldn't happen again when Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went live, developers had to trust that players would swiftly outdo the sort of numbers the team was able to throw up while making the game.

"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," Meurisse says.

The work has clearly paid off, as players have indeed posted some eye-watering numbers, and the game has held up just fine. While your damage is limited to 9,999 during the first two acts of the game, things are thrown wide open thereafter, and the results have been impressive.

Devs initially had an internal competition to see who could hit for the most damage – and players broke their record "in, like, one week" following launch. It's only gotten more gnarly from there, too. As we recently reported, one maestro dealt 1.4 trillion damage to the game's hardest boss, Simon. Even with health modifiers, ain't no one getting up from that.

For CTO and lead programmer Tom Guillermin, what could be better? It’s all "part of the vision of the game," he says. "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."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is only 85% of its creative director's original vision for the French JRPG, and he "would have loved" to do more with a specific fan-favorite character.