Painkiller creator and Witchfire lead Adrian Chmielarz has been thoroughly shocked by the state of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A game created by a team of 30, many of whom were new developers, the brilliant turn-based RPG has broken many minds due to its sheer quality.

In an interview with Games Industry, Chmielarz declares that Sandfall’s work on the award-winning RPG shows what’s “missing in AAA” game development nowadays. While every studio used to find clever workarounds to get games made quicker and cheaper while still breaking boundaries, many AAA studios have instead opted for massive budgets and larger teams.

“When we started The Astronauts, we said to ourselves, ‘We’d rather downscale the project to the team, rather than grow the team to the project.’” he said. “Even if we had the money, we wouldn’t do that. And the reason was we only wanted to work with the best.”

In an interview last year, Sandfall Interactive CEO Guillaume Broche expressed a similar philosophy. While Expedition 33 has been a huge success, the team won’t be massively expanding for their next game, and that next game may not even be another turn-based RPG.

“Last week I learned that the guys behind Expedition 33 hired a lot of newbies, people who didn’t make a game before,” the Painkiller creator said. “And now my world view is ruined, and I don’t know what to do,” he continued, adding: “Here we have a game that looks AAA to me, it’s just phenomenal in every aspect. There’s a deep story, deep method of work, good gameplay, great visuals and sound. It’s a very coherent product. And then you hear that the core team was 30 people, half of which were first timers. And I’m like, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

Massive team sizes have been a huge issue for the games industry over the last decade with budgets ballooning for all major AAA projects. Recently, Embark Studios CEO Patrick Soderland explained that EA’s Battlefield series became less efficient as team sizes ballooned into the thousands, and Skyrim designer Kurt Kuhlmann believes Starfield failed due to a massively increased team.

Chmielarz explained that his team on Witchfire uses outsourcing just like “Sandfall Interactive used a lot of outsourcing”, adding “that doesn’t change the fact that the core team responsible for the vast majority of the game and the ideas and execution is around 30 people”.

The Painkiller creator explained that the game’s biggest boon is that it show off “an incredible amount of smaart decisions that allow them to make a game that looks AAA, but is in reality full of shortcuts”. Chmielarz points towards the game’s faceless enemies, which are cheaper and easier to design and animate, and the fact that many of the cutscenes have little environmental interaction, allowing them to be produced much cheaper than other games.

The iconic FPS designer explained that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is AAA gaming how it used to be, although it’s still incredibly impressive to see such a high-quality game made for a small budget with just a few dozen developers at the helm.

For what it’s worth, Chmielarz own work on Witchfire is also commendable. While not as AAA-feeling as Clair Obscur, the brilliant FPS has incredible high-quality art, fantastic sound design, and some of the best gunplay since the original Destiny.