Lead designer Paweł Sasko praises Clair Obscur's design, likens it to Crimson Desert
- Rebel Wolves founder and former Witcher 3 director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz singled out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Crimson Desert as unusually fresh AAA RPGs. - In an April 2026 interview, he said both games feel like 1990s RPGs because “every game was some unknown,” not a copy. - The praise matters because both titles became proof that riskier single-player RPG design can still break through commercially.
RPG design is having one of those correction moments. For years, big-budget games kept drifting toward safer, more standardized formulas. Now Konrad Tomaszkiewicz — the former CD Projekt Red leader best known for directing The Witcher 3 and now heading Rebel Wolves — is pointing to two recent hits as evidence that players still want surprise. He singled out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Crimson Desert as the kind of games that feel genuinely different again. (ign.com) ### Who actually said this? It was Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, not Paweł Sasko. That matters because Tomaszkiewicz is the former Witcher 3 director and now the founder and CEO of Rebel Wolves, the studio making The Blood of Dawnwalker. The comments came from an April 2026 interview that got picked up widely across games media. (ign.com)sically, he argued that Clair Obscur and Crimson Desert stand out because they are “different” and “not a copy of other AAA games.” He tied that difference to risk — adding unusual ideas, chasing stronger immersion, and resisting the cold, spreadsheet-first logic that can flatten big releases into the same shape. (ign.com)bring up the 1990s? That was his shorthand for unpredictability. He said the two games make him feel like he did in the 1990s, when each new game on a 286 PC or Atari could be “some unknown.” The point wasn’t nostalgia for old hardware. It was that players used to expect novelty by default, and he thinks these games bring some of that feeling back. (ign.c([ign.com)hy these two games? Because they solve the same problem in different ways. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 pushed a high-fidelity turn-based RPG structure at a time when a lot of AAA publishers had backed away from that lane. Crimson Desert went the other direction — big open-world spectacle, systemic exploration, and a style that doesn’t feel built from the usua(ign.com)ave to look the same from game to game. (ign.com) ### Is this just empty praise? Not really — there’s a business argument underneath it. The same coverage around his comments framed both games as major commercial successes, with Crimson Desert reported at around 4 million copies sold and Clair Obscur at over 5 million, alongside a pile of 2025 Game of the Year wins for Clair Obscur. Even if those totals come from(ign.com)rent” is no longer being framed as artistic but impractical. (ign.com) ### Why does this matter for Rebel Wolves? Because Tomaszkiewicz is also talking about his own studio’s strategy. He said the whole point of setting up Rebel Wolves was to push AAA RPGs with “risky stuff” instead of repeating what already works. So this was praise for two peers, but it was also a mission statement for The Blood of Dawnwalker. (ign.com)paying attention? Because when someone tied to The Witcher 3 says the genre feels fresh again, that lands differently than random social-media hype. The industry has spent years debating whether expensive single-player RPGs can still justify bold design choices. His answer is basically yes — and he just named two games that, in his view, already proved it. (ign.com) ### Bottom line? The real story is less “famous dev likes game” and more “one of modern RPGs’ key architects says the safe formula is loosening.” Also, the original framing was off: the praise came from Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, and it was part of a broader argument that Clair Obscur and Crimson Desert show players still reward novelty. (ign.com)
