Despite Unreal Engine 5's mixed reputation among players, the developers at Sandfall Interactive are confident that without this engine, creating Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would have been virtually impossible.
In a new interview, CEO and creative director Guillaume Broche stated that Unreal Engine 5 provided the small team with all the necessary tools to create an AAA-level project.
According to Broche, the timely emergence of Epic Games' new technologies played a crucial role. During the game's production, not only Unreal Engine 5 itself became available, but also MetaHuman tools, as well as Nanite and Lumen technologies, which significantly improved graphics quality and accelerated development.
The studio head paid special attention to the Blueprints visual scripting system. He noted that it allows not only programmers but also level designers and technical artists to write game logic. At Sandfall Interactive, only four programmers worked on the project, but almost the entire team used Blueprints to create game mechanics and environments.
Technical artist Alexandre Breton also highly praised the capabilities of Blueprints. According to him, the system is easy to learn, and a large community of users constantly publishes tutorials, ready-made script sets, and examples that help accelerate development. Although Epic Games plans to gradually replace Blueprints with the new Verse/Scene Graph framework in Unreal Engine 6 in the future, for the current generation of projects, this technology remains one of the engine's main advantages.
The developers also commented on the possibility of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being released on Nintendo Switch 2. Studio co-founder and technical director Tom Guillermain admitted that porting the game presents a serious technical challenge. According to him, the team aimed for the highest possible image quality, while the Switch 2's performance is inferior to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and the limited resources of a small studio only complicate the work.
Nevertheless, the authors do not rule out a version for the new Nintendo console. Lead character artist and concept artist Alan Reynaud noted that Epic Games is developing Lumen Lite – a lighter version of the Lumen global illumination system, designed for portable devices like Nintendo Switch 2. If this feature is successfully implemented in Unreal Engine, it could significantly simplify the porting of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to the hybrid console.
For now, the developers are not ready to announce work on a port, but they confirm that they are closely monitoring the development of Unreal Engine and new engine capabilities that could help realize this project in the future.