26-Person Studio Tackles Expedition 33's Switch 2 Problem

When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept the 2025 Game Awards with nine wins from a record thirteen nominations, it did so as a game built to push PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC hardware. Every frame of Sandfall Interactive's surreal RPG leans on Unreal Engine 5's most demanding features: full Lumen global illumination, dense particle work, and painterly environments that look like nothing else in the genre. Now the studio wants to bring all of that to Switch 2, and the team is being refreshingly honest about how hard that's going to be.

In a recent postmortem event in Yokohama, reported by Automaton, CEO and creative director Guillaume Broche confirmed that Sandfall is actively exploring a port. But he stopped well short of announcing one.

"We are interested in looking for a way to do it, but it's too early for us to announce anything at this point."

Co-founder and CTO Tom Guillermin laid out the core tension: "It's a big technical challenge because we tried to do something beautiful with the game, but of course, the Switch 2 is not as powerful as the PlayStation or the Xbox Series X. So, it's an important thing for us to consider, especially given the size of our studio."

That last part is the detail that matters most. Sandfall has around 26 people. Most AAA ports to weaker hardware are handled by dedicated external studios with hundreds of engineers, or by internal teams large enough to split resources without slowing down their next project. Sandfall doesn't have that luxury, and Broche has been vocal about not wanting to hire aggressively. In the same Automaton interview, he called 26 people "more than enough" for pre-production on the studio's next game and warned that ballooning headcount would cost them the creative focus that made Expedition 33 work.

Unreal Engine's Lumen Problem

The engine itself is a complication. While Switch 2 officially supports Unreal Engine 5, Broche confirmed that "a lot of features don't work on Switch 2." Expedition 33 was built around those features. Stripping them out or replacing them isn't a simple toggle; it means reworking how the game looks and performs at a fundamental level.

Lead character and concept artist Alan Reynaud offered a sliver of hope, pointing to Lumen Lite, a lighter version of Epic's global illumination system that started rolling out with Unreal Engine 5.8 about a month ago. "They're introducing features like Lumen Lite now, which is easier to run than the standard Lumen, but these things take time to roll out, so we'll have to consider the updates coming from Unreal Engine to determine what to do."

I think this is the right call from Sandfall: wait for the tooling to catch up rather than brute-force a downgrade. A bad Switch 2 port of a GOTY winner would do more damage to the game's reputation than no port at all. And with a team this small, the opportunity cost of diverting engineers to a port is enormous. Every month spent wrestling with Switch 2 performance is a month not spent on whatever "a bit crazy" second game Broche has been teasing.

Speaking of which, Broche gave a candid look at where the studio's head is at. Expedition 33 took him six years. For most of the team, it was four to five. He wants the next project to recapture that initial creative spark: "We want to let ourselves dream again and be creative again. We're going to go a bit crazy." But he was clear that crazy doesn't mean big. "If we know we can't do everything, we have to focus on what matters, and I think that philosophy is what made Expedition 33 what it is."

The same postmortem touched on PlayStation's recent decision to end physical disc production starting in 2028. Broche called it "super sad," and Guillermin revealed that Sandfall had internal discussions about skipping a physical release for Expedition 33 because of the added cost and complexity. They went ahead anyway because, as Guillermin put it, "physical was something special" for the team. The full interview on that topic is a good read if you care about the disc debate.

For now, a Switch 2 version of Expedition 33 sits somewhere between genuine ambition and technical reality. Sandfall wants it to happen, but they're a 26-person studio that just shipped a GOTY winner and is already deep in pre-production on game number two. If Lumen Lite and future UE5 updates close the gap, we might see it. If they don't, I'd rather Sandfall spend those resources on whatever comes next.