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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 just received another patch—putting its finishing touches on the RPG’s difficulty options, alongside the usual bug fixes and the like. The game is now both easier and harder to play, based on what options you’d like to select. Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

For Story Mode players, the difficulty setting should now be more of what it says on the tin. Both parry and dodge windows have been increased by a whopping 40%, while damage taken has been further reduced from -10% to -50%.

While Story Mode wasn’t necessarily difficult, you still had to at least try to parry and dodge attacks—now players who choose the difficulty, for whatever reason, will be able to simply sit back, vibe, and enjoy the game’s banger of a soundtrack while getting existential in fantasy France.

‘But what if I like getting my hopes and dreams crushed?’ you might ask. Well, high-difficulty masochists like you and me aren’t being left out to dry, either. Expedition 33’s getting some new challenge modifiers.

You can now limit player damage, even with the pictos that uncaps it, to either 99,999 or 999,999, giving you a little more variability and potentially making certain builds (that aren’t Maelle going nuclear on some poor sod) more viable.

You can also multiply enemy HP by two, five, 10, 20, 50, or 100. Want Simon to have four billion, five hundred million health? Well, now you can. Speaking of, you’ll now be able to rematch the RPG’s traditional post-game superboss as much as you’d like.

Out of a morbid sense of curiosity, I decided to math out how many turns it’d take players with a damage cap of 9,999 (achieved by abstaining from the Painted Power pictos) to defeat a maximum-possible HP Simon.

Assuming the unlikely scenario in which every party member is striking for 9,999 for each turn, it’d take you, uh, 4,550,455 individual turns to chew through his health. Assuming each turn takes an efficient 20 seconds, skipping through all the animations and accounting for a few seconds of decision-making, that’s around 25,280 hours, or 1053 days, or almost three calendar years.

Obviously, there are some multi-hit abilities that’d let you put out more than 9,999 damage on a turn even with the cap. Which might, I don’t know, save you a couple of months, but the point still stands that this feat is hilariously unfeasible.

I somehow do not think people are going to be doing this Simon challenge run. You can read the full patch notes below.

Ver 1.3.0 Patch Notes

Expeditioners,

We have just rolled out a patch, and uploaded our first ever items to the Steam Points Shop! You have some unique Trading Cards to choose from, alongside a series of emoticons. We hope you love them!

As for the patch, see our notes below where we have called out the most impactful changes.

Tomorrow comes!

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Note 12:43 CEST – We are investigating Mouse Sensitivity issues following this patch. Stay tuned!

Simon Rematch

• Players can now rematch Simon after defeating him!

Story Mode Balancing

Story mode is our easiest difficulty setting.

• Parry and dodge windows increased by 40%
• Incoming damage reduced by 10% to 50%

Challenge Modifiers (Act III onward)

At flag checkpoints, players can now:

• Limit max player damage to 99,999 or 999,999
• Multiply enemy HP by x2, x5, x10, x20, x50, or x100

Bug Fixes (297 total, notable examples below)

• Verso now gains Perfection correctly when in reserve
• Simoso weapon will no longer cause lag due to memory leaks
• General polish across collisions, terrain, and scripting
• Cutscenes scale properly on ultrawide and non-standard resolutions
• Fixed a bug where loading a save after resting at a different location would spawn the player at coordinate zero
• Placeholder textures removed near Chromatic Boucheclier and his battlearena
• Fixed performance drops from repeated resting on certain levels
• Crash after dialogue sequences resolved
• Fixed stability issues after extended play sessions
• French voiceover now plays correctly when selected

System & Settings

• Audio can now be muted or unmuted when the game is running in the background
• Mouse and joystick sensitivity improvements
• Manual save file renaming is now supported (EXPEDITION_XX format required. XX must be a value between 00 and 09.)

Localization

• Rolling credits updated (added creature VO, refined IOI section)
• Font size adjustments for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
• New strings added and minor text corrections implemented

Thank you all for your continued support. We hope you enjoy today’s changes. If you have any new issues or want to report a bug, please continue using this form for us.

We continue!~ The Expedition 33 Team

PCGamer.com