I heaped a lot of praise about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s (E33) character animations already, and yet I feel a bit remiss for not showing what I was talking about. Below is a Youtube link to a “behind-the-scenes compilation of several early-game scenes, which includes both the finished game sequence (sans official voice actors) + the motion capture actors.

I would not consider these to be spoilers, as they occur within the first 5ish hours of the game. But…

In my First Impressions post, I said the following:

Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.

Feel free to watch the whole four-minute video, but the soul debridement happens at around 3:25.

All of it is so ridiculously good that I had to look up whether Sandfall Interactive had invented some secret tech or whatever, because why isn’t every new game coming out like this? Did they pour 80% of their budget into mocap or something?

Near as I can tell… nope. Or, technically nope. Most of the magic outside the performances themselves comes from off-the-shelf features of Unreal Engine 5. So, in many ways the “secret sauce” had a lot to do with being a new, smaller team without a lot of tech debt being able to pivot to an entirely new game engine at the perfect time. As this article points out, most of the work they did in UE4 had to be redone entirely due to the engine differences. One could imagine how much work would be thrown away if instead it was in a custom-made engine. A larger studio with 500 developers with 15+ years of experience on a proprietary engine is thus unlikely to be able to match E33 anytime soon (if ever).

Which… goddamn. Talk about perfect time and place.

In any case, I am a bit more optimistic about the (gaming) future. Sandfall Interactive probably doesn’t quite qualify as an “indie” studio, but I do consider these smaller teams to be the best path through the coming industry implosion. That we get to enjoy premium facial animations while doing so is all the more a bargain.