Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been getting a lot of praise. It’s the best-rated new game this year on Metacritic, and now even Hideo Kojima has praised the way it was made.
Kojima’s love of relatively small teams is well-known. He previously said he doesn’t really want more than 150 people working on games like Death Stranding 2, for example.
“When I first started, it was like a team of six. You could do everything yourself,” Kojima now says in a roundtable interview attended by Dexerto. “Now, it’s expanded. You can’t really control each employee, so you delegate. But sometimes, the idea doesn’t really work out because it’s a bigger team.”
Looking to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive, Kojima says: “They only have like 33 team members and a dog,” adding: “That’s my ideal when I create something with a team.”
It’s important to note that while there were around that many core staff, there were also contractors and partners listed in the game’s credits – so more than 33 people worked on the game.
“Creation has now become much bigger,” Kojima says. “Big companies, like 600, 1,000 people, they’re full of totally different teams. Everyone’s concentrating on their work and then combining together.”
While many hands make light work, I can see why some developers would prefer smaller teams, especially those with more directorial desires such as Kojima. It’s possible for things to feel like they’ve been designed by committee when you’ve got a large group of people to work with.
Still, needs must, and sometimes you just need bodies. “During the pandemic… It was over 200 people [working on Death Stranding 2],” Kojima says, but he “couldn’t tell that to George [Miller].”
Miller, director of Mad Max and Happy Feet (the man’s got range), told Kojima that nomadic sheep herders kept their flock to 150 sheep, as it’s hard for humans to track more than that. Although Kojima says he told Miller “I went a little over 150, and we laughed about it.”
While you wait for Death Stranding 2 and think about sheep, check out all the upcoming games of 2025 that you have to look forward to.
