Rakqoi

I think the story is a point where people unfairly criticize the game, personally. After the tutorial dungeon you don’t have to engage with it whatsoever.

The parts where you have to search for relics between each dungeon are meant to encourage exploration and remove the pressure of the story. It’s the game saying “now go do whatever and have fun!” and you make progress toward the story just by playing normally, as you come across settlements belonging to the particular species you need to scan.

If your goal is to speedrun the story and drop the game, then yeah those parts are annoying, but if you want a sandbox game where you are free to do anything you want, then I don’t really understand why people complain so much about those parts of the main story.

I think you have missed the actual issue here. The issue is not whether or not the game currently contains AI assets, the issue is whether AI was used during development. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):

“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

“In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.”

The actual problem is that simply using generative AI during development disqualifies a game from being nominated, and Sandfall Interactive lied and said they did not use gen AI.

for the first year or two after it was originally announced, I was pretty excited about it.

Then I learned that the entire project was started because Mojang changed their TOS to stop hypixel from preying so much on children with their in-server microtransactions… and so they decided to make their own game where they are allowed to prey on children freely.

no wonder it fell into development hell. that’s an awful basis for a game of the scope of hytale.

that’s such a terrible name choice haha… apparently it’s a cute lil animal, but searching for it, the chat service doesn’t even show up in the search results at all (because well… it’s a real animal). there’s also already a software called stoat (though it’s a github build metrics viewer app and not a chat app)

but imagine trying to convince people to switch to stoat… “add me on stoat!”

movement was done by typing a wasd key then hitting enter lol.

haha I adore this, now I really want someone to make a full game with this control scheme

Oh wow this gave me a wave of nostalgia for my first experience developing games. I took a class in like middle school for game development, and they provided the software Alice for the course.

I fondly remember trying to make a first person, open world sandbox RPG, but if I remember correctly, the engine not being able to create new instances of anything severely limited what I wanted to do. Also, the engine had a ton of floating point precision issues and everything would be rotated in funny ways after the game was running for a long time. And I hated the visual programming and got so frustrated that I couldn’t just type the scripts instead haha… that’s when I switched to GameMaker

Anyway, I was reminded of it because the first enemies in my game were also sword-wielding skeletons just like in the OP screenshots. I appreciate the peak into your past, and I’m thankful for that nostalgia hit :3