okay today’s video is kind of wild and I’ll start by sharing some stats and keep in mind this is all from a core team of just 30 people so 1 million sales in 3 days and that’s not even counting Game Pass so there’ll be a load more players a 97% recommendation in Open Critic a 92% on Steam as of the first 17,000 reviews there have been thousands more and obviously a lot of copies sold on PlayStation basically by any numbers Clarobcura Expedition 33 is one of the best games this year but there’s a thing this is not like a lot of the other games it’s actually a tiny core team a core team of just 30 this is their debut title and it’s uh well a turnbased RPG this is in a genre that the big players so far have dismissed and at least from like an audience’s perspective it completely came out of nowhere so that’s the overall story of Expedition 33 in the market though parts of it aren’t always accurate now I’m not here to in the team very much the opposite to oversimplistically glaze them actually undermines how much of an achievement this game actually is how sensible how smart this team have been and we’ll also be able to cover today where the game came from and who funded it first up if you’re not part of the million sales Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG with reactive combat quicktime events set in a painterly world where anyone past the age of 33 is killed by a wrathful god you and your party set out to do basically the the JRPG thing you know you save yourselves save the world you may even kill God at the end but I haven’t actually got there yet so we’ll see now while just about everything in this game is being praised what’s really standing out is the prologue the prologue is utterly incredible beyond that though it’s exceedingly French and just as the French comics and animation scene owes a big debt to Japan so does this game and that’s not just me editorializing that is overtly a parallel drawn by the creative director who gave the producer copies of FF10 and Persona 5 but to my horror not a copy of the best JRPG of all time which obviously is The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age anyway here’s what’s wild about this game it’s not AAA even though it’s besting them even though it looks like one in a way the sheer excitement around Expedition 33 almost underplays the many reasons why this game is able to punch way above its weight class one of the biggest talking points about Expedition 33 is the team itself that somehow only 30 developers made this thing that they cast off the shackles of Ubisoft and made a linear game that was the opposite of an Ubisoft game and that thankfully is not wrong but it’s also not the full story so here it goes sandfall Interactive are a new studio established in 2020 expedition 33 was in development since 2019 that’s back when the creative director at Guom I think is how you say his name uh was noodling around in Unreal Engine for the first time and uh it sure seems Unreal lit a fire under him so he and a bit under half of their team hail from Ubisoft the rest are from studios like Cyanide or other indie groups there are plenty of veterans but here’s the wild thing for the majority of that team Expedition 33 is their first industry credit and that is especially the case in level VFX and technical art just kind of wild honestly I’d say that is sort of insane and in a way it makes me sad it suggests that we should have had far more games like this you see the 2020s saw a wave of senior staff right at AAA companies leave those companies to start their own team it was a real hot funding environment and look the ex Blizzard people the XB Boware people you’ve seen all of that stuff but as we’ve covered here that has tended not to end well and very often not because the game comes out and it’s bad but because the financial landscape changed which is basically to say there were loads of other teams kind of like this one but the funding environment just ended up killing them yet we just look at Sandfall and we look at this game this game is the single best argument for this model of development yet but that’s all surface level let’s go a little bit deeper to see how the game was actually made to start Sandfall have a team of 30 now 30 is really just not enough to make a game like this just in terms of the pure amount of labor now one way around this problem is to scale up the headcount of your team but doing so is extremely hard and that core problem has led to fun times in the industry so back in the day companies would swell up their headcount to produce a game and then they would do mass layoffs that obviously sucked these companies would end up losing a lot of institutional knowledge so in response many companies then became multi-RO studios now that is hard the point though is whenever one project has its big production bulk another is in pre-production then whenever the big production of one is over those staff can move to the game that’s just finished its pre-production and then ideally you don’t have to fire a load of people and lose all your institutional knowledge the thing is though game development is you know kind of hard and lining up those schedules is yeah is is is a challenge this has led to a lot of issues in the industry and to top it all off those companies end up so large that it’s just a level of scale that erodess focus focus is king sandfall went with a different option then they went with outsourcing and as an example we see that clearly in this eightperson animation team that they hired as well as porting quality assurance music and the publishing arm of this game and the publishing I’ll come back to there’s actually more to that story the focus that they gain from being a team of just 30 well pays off big time now to put all this together you then of course have the engine which is Unreal 5 that makes this game look like a AAA game but it’s staff who know how to use that engine that make it feel like a AAA game and so very often that’s the difference and all that while doing gameplay in a genre the AAA at least by the conventions of today would simply not make turn-based battling mini games and an overworld map that players can navigate it is all classic JRPG stuff so the Final Fantasy inspirations might be a source of that feeling but you think about Final Fantasy and you think about FF16 ff16 in the more recent games have been moving towards action gameplay and that has soured a lot of people and that’s because right it’s always been framed as a common wisdom that turn-based games do not sell as well and are not as popular as games that are not turn-based what we see here is Sandfall ignoring those beliefs and making the game that they wanted inspired by the games that inspired them say FFX and that is some damn laudable they’re not chasing industry trends here but actually in a way you could say that they are now I don’t mean this in a bad way it’s more to expose a strange thing that’s happened the industry critics and audiences seem to actually love turn-based RPGs so looking at Open Critic of the last 10 years only two have not had at least one turn-based RPG in the top 20 rated games so these are big people do love them and that’s not even counting wells turn-based games like Octopath Wasteland or Like a Dragon so the AAA industry is capable of making turn-based RPGs let alone indies but maybe what people were missing was a classic Japanese RPG right uh with action-based combat mini games party dynamics the things that we’re seeing here plus of course some of the fresh ideas of indie games and that’s why say Sea of Stars did so well in 2023 i mean it’s basically and yes this is reductive Expedition 33 but with top- down pixel art instead of 3D graphics so maybe it’s not just about the genre making the game a success it’s about the AAA feel of that genre being a surprise i think that’s actually the big thing here the fact that this game looks and feels AAA in a way that something like Sea of Stars or even Metaphor Refantasio well doesn’t right and as much as I love the stylization of metaphor or persona it is not photoreal absolutely effect to the tits square style JRPG stuff and uh you know what that’s what this game is able to hit and I think that is what makes it seem so incredibly fresh and a lot of that is because they’ve clearly made it smart and well UE5 does actually give developers a hell of a lot of things out of the box games are currently in the middle of a crisis of marketing so you’d be forgiven for not knowing about Expedition 33 but it would be a little unfair to say that this game came out of nowhere we had appearances at Xbox’s big showcases full features in PC Gamer and Edge and so much hype it got a Game Pass deal and even before this had a release Variety was confirming that it already had a film deal so if it came out of nowhere from a tiny bunch of indies how does it have a film deal well we can talk about that so within the industry this game has been known as one pushed for success and that feels counter to the idea or some of them that we’ve been talking about lately i mean last week we did a video talking about uh well narrative games being cancelled because publishers are suggesting they’re too risky expedition 33 certainly runs counter to that but here’s the thing here’s the difference this game’s publisher is actually a bunch of indie developers they’re called Kepler Interactive now they launched in 21 they’ve been making pretty big waves I’d say in the indie and double A space the the TLDDR right is a collective of indie devs who have pulled talents and resources to support each other in publishing their games and other games games like say Pacific Drive Sefue Scorn um Ticha as well so fairly big successes now that doesn’t mean that like everything they touch is gold ultra and Bionic Bay have not done as well so you may not know about those but regardless these are games that are made on their developers terms because their publisher actually knows what it’s like to make those games and to top it all off they have connections connections that get these games the best shot possible like we’ve seen with the movie thing like we’ve seen with Xbox and all of the featuring this game’s got so you can see how this all basically has came together sandfall can work at their own pace because of a healthy publishing arrangement they can work in delivering the genre experience that they want with AAA class tools that are I guess more democratized more powerful than ever they then have the connections to proper hardcore outsourced talent like those say eight gameplay animators and that means that they can put together something with very clear scope at an astounding level of quality quite seemingly with a hell of a lot more efficiency than a massive traditional bloated AAA team if there’s one thing you take away it should be this expedition 33 is not successful for any one reason it’s not popular just because it’s made by a small team it’s not good just because it’s a throwback RPG to say that actually does a disservice to the incredibly polished well-executed game that this team has produced they spent six years working on an idea that came from artistic inspirations they took their favorite games and then synthesized them into something that they are excited to play that’s new that’s their vision they partnered with a publisher who respected them enough to help them make this game the way that they wanted when you put all of those things together then you get a game like this and while the average dev or indie can certainly not count on those connections and that backing I think there are massive massive lessons to be learned here and it reminds me of a comparison one between Assassin’s Creed Shadows and uh Ghost of Tsushima and yes it was a dramatic time and I think Shadows has critically overperformed what many people would have expected but what I found interesting was just comparing the team sizes between them and it very much does seem to be smaller teams better conditions more tight scope that That’s thumbs up that’s good so many of the problems we’ve had these days with with slop and just all the bad stuff it just seems that it’s these massively expensive huge amounts of money huge expectations and unrealistic goals and of course all you know to the whim of a quarterly earnings report which we also covered in in our last video so you know what i’ll leave it at that if you want to know why EA just made massive cuts that will absolutely hurt the uh the EA games that we actually do care about watch this video next