Why Clair Obscur's Final Boss Feels So Easy
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has quickly become a standout RPG on PC, praised for its style, combat, and story. Many players, though, have had the same surprising experience near the end. They dive deep into the side content, power up their party, then finally walk into the last fight and absolutely steamroll the final boss.
If you are the kind of player who loves to clear every quest marker before rolling credits, you probably felt this too. The final encounter can turn from a tense climax into a quick clean up job. In a recent interview with Edge magazine, the developers explained exactly why that happened and what they would do differently.
Lead game designer Michel Nohra admits they underestimated how many players would go completionist before finishing the main story. The team expected a mix of approaches, but they did not anticipate just how many people would do literally everything before touching the final dungeon.
That design decision has a very clear result. If you chase every optional quest, explore the overworld thoroughly, and squeeze every bit of power out of the systems, you walk into the final fight overleveled and overprepared. The intended dramatic showdown becomes more of a victory lap.
What The Devs Meant To Happen
Nohra explains that the real issue is not exactly the tuning of the boss itself, but how the game communicates what you should do and when. The team always meant for players to tackle the final boss closer to when it becomes available, not after sweeping the map of side quests.
In most RPGs, players often treat the final boss as a psychological finish line. Once they step over it and see the credits, motivation to return and clear optional content can drop. Knowing this, many players deliberately avoid the last story quest and instead farm out every bit of side content first. Clair Obscur’s devs underestimated just how strong that instinct would be.
Nohra notes that they do not actually regret the way the boss was tuned. Instead, he regrets not making it much clearer that if you want the intended challenge, you should face the final boss earlier. In other words, the game should have done a better job nudging players towards wrapping up the main story before going into full completionist mode.
There is also a subtle design trap here. If the team had scaled the final boss to match players who did every optional activity, that could have made the fight punishing or unfair for anyone who played more straightforwardly. It is a tricky balance. Scale too hard and casual or story focused players pay the price. Tune for the average player and completionists end up overpowered.
Nohra agrees that simply scaling the boss higher for fully decked out players was not necessarily the right move either. The safer path would have been stronger guidance about when to challenge the last dungeon and clearer messaging around how much side content the end boss is balanced for.
How Player Behavior Surprised The Team
Lead programmer Tom Guillermin added another interesting angle in the same interview. He says the team’s expectations were shaped by simple humility. They were not sure if Clair Obscur would land as strongly as it did. Because of that, they assumed many players might just mainline the story to see how it ended and then move on to something else.
If a studio is not convinced their game will hold attention for the long haul, it makes sense to avoid putting too much of the experience behind optional content or completionist grinds. The developers wanted to make sure that players who mostly cared about the story would have a smooth path right to the finish without getting stuck on an overtuned final boss.
What actually happened was the opposite. Players loved the game enough to wring it dry. Guillermin says they were surprised to see people doing every single piece of side content before even setting foot in the final dungeon. It is a good problem to have, but it caught them off guard when they realized how that playstyle interacted with their difficulty curve.
That same humility shows up in how the studio is talking about its future. After Clair Obscur ended up sweeping a stack of awards and becoming one of the biggest surprise hits of the year, there is now real pressure around whatever they build next. In the interview they stress that they want to keep perspective, stay grounded, and trust their instincts rather than chase expectations.
For players, the whole situation is a nice peek behind the curtain at how small tuning choices and assumptions about player behavior can reshape an entire endgame. If you are planning to jump into Clair Obscur now and you want the final boss to feel like a real test instead of a formality, the solution is simple.
- Push the main story further instead of clearing everything the moment it pops up.
- Use side content to support your progress, not completely outpace it.
- When the final dungeon opens, consider heading there sooner if you want the intended difficulty.
And if you already flattened the final boss on your first run, at least you know why. The developers were planning for a more direct story rush, while you and a lot of other PC players decided to squeeze every last bit of content from one of the best new RPGs on the platform.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/clair-obscur-expedition-33s-lead-says-they-messed-up-a-little-by-putting-a-ton-of-great-endgame-content-next-to-a-final-boss-you-can-easily-outlevel-we-werent-sure-if-our-game-was-going-to-be-that-good/
