A balancing problem
Behind the enthusiasm that we can feel regarding Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33it is natural to point out what works less well. Michel Nohra also has one regret about the game, which concerns the third act and the endgame part of the game.
The latter is completely dispensable and secondary, but many people took advantage of the last moments of freedom on the game map to accomplish a whole bunch of challenges, some of them being very difficult. Many people then faced the final boss with a level far too high for the latter.thus removing all the tension from this confrontation. And this is precisely what the lead designer regrets, indicating that the studio underestimated the public’s desire to explore this additional content:
“ My only regret is not having specified that to have the level of difficulty planned for the boss, you had to defeat him now [sans aller explorer ailleurs]. Often, players don’t want to finish the game and therefore do all the side content first, because once the main story is finished, there is usually less motivation to tackle it. This is an aspect that I underestimated, which disappointed those who were hoping for a difficult final boss fight. I don’t regret our approach, but we could have explained things better about this. »
Tom Guillermin, lead programmer, adds:
“ We weren’t sure our game would be that good. And if it wasn’t, players might have just wanted to see the story and skip to the end. So, we were surprised to see that people were doing all the content in the game before even reaching the final dungeon. We are delighted with it, but it was unexpected. »
A little rebalancing of the final dungeon according to our level would not have been too much, just to maintain a little challenge during the most fateful moment of the game. An aspect which can undoubtedly be easily rectified in the studio’s next project, now that it knows the habits of the public better.