It’s no secret that part of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s team was cobbled together by director Guillaume Broche on websites like Soundcloud and Reddit. It’s a fact that’s charming, given how excellent the end result was, but it also means the game’s early development is forever enshrined on the good ol’ information highway.
Five years ago, Broche posted to r/RecordThisForFree when the game was in its infancy, and he was attempting to put together a solid concept demo and trailer for it.
Titled “We Lost” at the time, Broche wrote: “I’ll conclude my post by saying that if this project takes off, we will probably want to keep working with you for the rest of the project as a member of the team.”
While the trailer itself has been made private, user Palmoleum on the r/Expedition33 subreddit was able to get their hands on a saved version of the trailer from a friend, and it’s just so charmingly janky—especially given the ambitious, gorgeous, 150+ song-strong diamond the game would eventually become.
Early draft trailer for the game from r/expedition33
While there are a couple of familiar names, the differences are like night and day. “Did you kill them all?” a text-to-voice robot asks. “To this question, I have no answer,” an equally stilted answer comes. “As I clean my blade from the blood of the innocent, I wonder: Is there no-one left to save? Now it all ends. Turning our back to humanity as we condemn it. This was our story. The story of how we fought. And the story of how we lost.”
Cheery. While a lot has changed since this first draft, it’s good to know that Broche’s existential maze of emotion wasn’t any less severe five years ago.
Other key differences include a lack of the Paper Mario-style QTEs from the full game—and a seeming lack of parries or dodges, signalling that Expedition 33 was once a far more classical JRPG instead of the delicious genre-blend it became. There are also glimpses of some more futuristic and steampunk environments—a sign the painterly aesthetic wasn’t locked in until much later.
More than anything, though, watching this trailer’s made me re-examine my biases a tad. If I had this job at the time, I might’ve seen a post with this trailer and gently rolled my eyes, before moving on, wondering if the team at Sandfall actually had the expertise it needed to pull off something excellent. I’d have been dead wrong.
It’s a sobering reminder, then, to not let the irrational part of my brain (that thinks games are spun together with magic) win. Almost every game that makes its way into your hands started as a janky proof of concept—and having new blood like Sandfall Interactive enter the RPG arena can only be a good thing. I’m very glad that some fresh talents, like the game’s lead writer, took a chance on We Lost—because we all gained a ton from them doing so.
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