The more tools you give players to fine-tune their builds, the sooner they’ll find a way to crack your game’s math wide open. That’s a lesson that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive learned in record time, as two of its leads explained in a YouTube interview earlier this week (via GamesRadar).
While speaking with Pirate Software, Clair Obscur game director Guillaume Broche said the studio had hosted “an internal small competition” during the game’s development to see which of its developers could deal the most damage in a single attack. Once the game launched, however, that internal damage record didn’t last long.
“The players broke it in like, one week,” Broche said.
However, the Clair Obscur devs haven’t surrendered the title just yet. Broche said that Sandfall VFX artist and internal damage recordholder Léo Paris has become the proverbial Vegeta to the playerbase’s Goku.
“Someone took the throne online and now he’s engaging with him on Twitter,” Broche said. Art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe acknowledged the burgeoning anime rivalry, saying there’s “constant posts of the score constantly going up between the two.”
I dove into the X timeline to see if I could reconstruct the ongoing DPS race. The one upsmanship seemed to begin on April 24—Clair Obscur’s launch day—when user BltzZ11 posted a screenshot showing an attack dealing 410.9 million damage. Paris appeared in the replies as though summoned by the emergence of a worthy challenger.
“Are you in NG+ ? I won’t say a lot but there might be something out here to do more than this,” Paris said. “I’m the current holder of the record at the studio so I’m watching out for my throne you know.”
Undaunted by Paris’s omen, BltzZ11 and fellow contender Schrodingersba4 entered the laboratory to concoct a build that could unseat Sandfall’s champion. First, Schrodingersba4 crossed the 688 million threshold. Then, BltzZ11 dropped a screenshot of a staggering 1.1 billion damage attack.
“Parry this,” Paris said, almost tripling BltzZ11’s numbers with his standing record: a 3.2 billion damage attack. Then, on April 30, Schrodingersba4 did the impossible, declaring “Maelle supremacy” with a record-breaking 3.4 billion damage, which the official Clair Obscur account acknowledged as having “gone and done it.”
My god. He’s only gone and done it. @SandfallEorys come here.April 30, 2025
Like all good anime rivals, however, Schrodingersba4 encouraged Paris—who he called his “muse”—to surpass his limits, telling the Sandfall dev “I believe in you.” That belief, it seems, was well placed. Paris reclaimed his title the next day after landing a 4.3 billion damage swing.
As a wise man once said, “What’s better than this—guys being dudes?”
In this week’s interview with Pirate Software, Broche said it’s proof of a game’s success when players have an urge to turn its combat math inside out, even if it means the studio has to nerf a skill like Stendahl every now and then.
“The speed at which people found broken builds and everything were a testament to how much they love the systems,” Broche said “So that’s great.”
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