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Over a year on from its monumental launch, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche has been looking back on what he and his fellow devs at Sandfall Interactive were told before their RPG's release – namely, that "no one's going to like" it.

The mere concept of that seems completely impossible now that the game is out – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 became the second ever game after Baldur's Gate 3 to collect all five major Game of the Year awards last year, after all. But speaking to Konbini in a new episode of Video Game Club on YouTube (below), Broche says the devs were warned about their plans for the RPG's combat.

"With Clair Obscur, there are plenty of design decisions that are fundamentally flawed," Broche begins. "What we heard a lot before we released the game was: 'You're making a game that mixes the challenging aspects of an action game – with dodging and parrying – with turn-based gameplay. No one's going to like it. Turn-based players like turn-based games, and action players like action games.'"

Of course, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 wasn't the first game to experiment with mechanics like this. Look at 1996's Super Mario RPG, which blended real-time action with its turn-based system – perfectly timed button presses make your attacks hit harder or blocks absorb more damage. A lot of players love this blend, and the Clair Obscur devs were no different when they were making their own game.

"We didn't care," Broche says of the warning Sandfall had received. "We think it's cool, we play it, and it's fun. We combined the two, and it worked. But fundamentally, there are a lot of design decisions that, from an outside or business perspective, make no sense at all."

In the same video, Broche explains that he thinks "imperfections" in games add to their charm, while "games that try to be perfect, that try to fix all their flaws – they're usually just really boring. " By his own admission, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't perfect, either – just look at its "unbearable" minigames .

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director thinks devs will eventually "be able to churn out a game in 5 seconds with a prompt," but he hopes they're not any good.

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In order for stars to form, you need the right ingredients to make it happen: gravity, mass, time, and of course the right type of matter in the form of baryons. Shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe had plenty of them, but they were all very simple: protons, deuterons, helium-3 and helium-4 nuclei, and a tiny bit of lithium-7. These nuclei, made out of protons and neutrons, were all that the Universe gave us to work with prior to the formation of stars. But, in clumps of material small and large, from individual star clusters to enormous galaxy cluster scales and everything in between, these baryons went to work and, across the Universe over the past 13.8 billion years, created sextillions of stars within the observable Universe.

In a very real way, the story of how we ourselves came to be is the story of how baryons evolved, matured, and wound up deducing our own cosmic history . Yet so many mysteries about that process still remain, from the baryon life cycles within galaxies to identifying the right conditions to trigger star-formation in the vastly different environments where they formed throughout cosmic history. Yet, it’s by examining so many different environments where stars do and don’t form, in galaxies of all different masses and metallicities, and in the modern, nearby Universe as well as far back in ancient cosmic history, that we can begin to piece the full story together.

Here to guide us through this topic, and starring in this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I’m so pleased to welcome newly-minted Dr. Ava Polzin to the show . Ava got her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is about to begin a postdoc at the University of Toronto, and has a whirlwind tour of information in store for us all on this episode of the podcast. Plus, at the end, there are a few bonuses she was eager to highlight, and you can find the links to two fabulous papers she’s written for the good of the world below:

Astronomy as a Field: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04041

Picture an Astronomer: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24465

Make sure you tune in; this is one episode you won’t want to miss!

This article Starts With A Bang podcast #131 – The baryon life cycle is featured on Big Think .