Baldur’s Gate 3 Predicted Clair Obscur’s Success At 2024 TGAs

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out of nowhere. Yes, it made waves at Microsoft’s Xbox showcase last summer. And true, it continued to look exceptional as it revealed its star-studded cast. But I don’t know that anyone expected it to get quite so much love as it has, and not just from diehard RPG fans. It’s currently the highest-rated game of 2025 on Metacritic and a possible frontrunner for Game of the Year at the Game Awards. No one could have predicted this. Except someone did: the director of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Only a few months back at The Game Awards 2024, Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke took the stage to announce that year’s GOTY winner—Astro Bot—but also to offer his prediction for who would win the best game of 2025 and every year after that as well. “How do I know this? Well, an oracle told me,” he joked. The director of BG3, which swept most awards shows the year prior, laid out what would be the defining qualities of future winners as an allegory for what he hoped more studios and companies would strive for in the years ahead.

“The oracle told me that the Game of the Year 2025 is going to be made by a studio who found the formula to make it up here on stage,” Vincke said. “It’s stupidly simple, but somehow it keeps on getting lost. A studio makes a game because they want to make a game they want to play themselves. They created it because it hadn’t been created before. They didn’t make it to increase market share. They didn’t make it to serve the brand. They didn’t have to meet arbitrary sales targets, or fear being laid off if they didn’t meet those targets.”

He continued,

They were driven by idealism, and wanted players to have fun, and they realized that if the developers don’t have fun, nobody was going to have any fun. They understood the value of respect, that if they treated their developers and players well, the same developers and players would forgive them when things didn’t go as planned. But above all they cared about their games, because they love games. It’s really that simple.

The speech’s relevance to the circumstances surrounding Sandfall Interactive and its debut game hasn’t gone unnoticed among Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fans as the developers have talked about their passion for the genre and the classics that inspired them. At a time when turn-based RPGs are considered more niche, Expedition 33 doesn’t shy away from throwback features like a world map and separate battle screens, all in service of a story that’s not afraid to leave players fumbling for answers.

The connection to Vincke’s speech recently blew up on the game’s subreddit. “It’s not that Expedition 33 is a perfect game,” wrote one fan. “If you look for flaws or things that other games have that E33 doesn’t, you’ll find a few things. But still, the game has passion at its every corner and that’s what really sticks with us in the end. The flaws are so easy to ignore because the things that really matter are perfect.”

In a video game industry struggling to please players and hit sales targets amid swelling budgets, increased competition, and stagnating creativity, Expedition 33 has been turned into something of a golden child: a small team utilizing off-the-shelf tech and extensive outsourcing to bring a good idea to fruition without breaking the bank or succumbing to feature bloat. The efficacy of that roadmap for other developers is debatable, but the results so far speak for themselves. Following Vincke’s advice might not guarantee success, but not doing so increasingly seems to assure mediocrity.

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