Former Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider is not known to be shy about sharing his opinions, and so he did in April, saying that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is “kind of to JRPGs what Baldur’s Gate 3 was to CRPGs.” Not everyone took the statement quite as he meant it, though, and so speaking recently to GamesRadar, Gaider clarified that what he meant was simply that both games are “kind of love letters to their genre that allow what they’ve created to translate to a larger audience than what that genre normally hits.”
“The sales for Baldur’s Gate 3 were amazing, and kind of make a lie out of—I remember when I was at EA, there was a lot of investigation into how large is the RPG audience, and how large is the action audience, and so forth,” Gaider said. “And they would have an estimate and they’d say it caps out, oh, the RPG audience caps out at about five million. But that doesn’t seem to be true when the game is good.”
“Good” is very subjective, and it doesn’t always add up to success: Plenty of good games are overlooked or fail to meet some arbitrary sales goal for any number of reasons, not least of which is the overwhelming number of “good” games out there. One obvious example is EA’s own recent RPG epic, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which was well received by critics and players but failed to put up sufficient numbers and may well mark the end of the series, at least for now.
But Gaider is seemingly talking about the much rarer phenomenon of games that are truly exceptional, rather than merely good.
“I think there’s such a thing as expanding the audience, as opposed to treating the audience as this finite number of people, right?” he said. “And I think that’s what Expedition 33 really does. I think it manages to take the elements of JRPGs—and I don’t think it’s doing a lot of new things, honestly. It’s taking a number of more recent trends and kind of bundling them up in an interesting way that I think makes it very accessible to people who normally wouldn’t play JRPGs.”
And, he said, the successes of Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3 also demonstrates “what’s possible when a game is given time to cook. “Baldur’s Gate 3 had an extended and very front-facing early access period, while Clair Obscur director Guillaume Broche said earlier in May (via MP1st) that it would’ve taken years to get the project approved at his former company Ubisoft.
“[Publishers] want mass appeal,” Gaider said. “They want to feel comfortable, de-risk it by imagining how the appeal translates to many different kinds of audiences, which I think often kind of ends up diluting the very specific things a game can do. Like I said, what BG3 did and what Expedition does is, yes, they appeal very, very strongly to that one audience, but it’s so strong that it ends up growing that audience.”
He’s not wrong. Coming up on two years after its full release, Baldur’s Gate 3 remains among the most-played games on Steam, and while Clair Obscur has only been around for a month it’s right up there too, posting enviable numbers for what should by rights be a relatively niche RPG—and both are rolling with “overwhelmingly positive” user ratings on top.
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