Video game development can be a rather stressful occupation; from exhaustive and soul-crushing crunch hours to out-of-touch executives, it’s not always the most uplifting sphere to work in. In recent interview with the FRVR podcast, former Ubisoft developer Clint Hocking, who was last working as director of Assassin’s Creed: Hexe (the latest being developed in the franchise, set during Holy Roman Empire witch trials with the setting’s actual date being unclear as of now), discusses the difficulty of working with large teams consisting of 1,000 people.
Hocking ended up being the first of two directors to step away from the project, but due to an NDA was unable to talk with FRVR about his time with Hexe– however he did speak about his time working on Watch Dogs: Legion, released back in 2020. Hocking worked as co-director of said game alongside Kent Hudson, and described the experience saying, “It very often feels like pissing upstream”. According to Hocking, he would attend meetings consisting of thirty people, including directors, producers, and project managers, but would exclude the likes of level designers who built the content, quest, or location that was being discussed in said meetings. Hocking stated on the podcast that, “…there’s people there just writing down what you say and making tasks out of it (…) Then you finish the review, and you say, ‘OK, well then when are we going to see the iterations and the improvements that we talked about?’ And they’re like, ‘Well…so it’s going to be six weeks before we see an iteration on this because the person who needs to do the iteration is working on this.’ Then, by the time you get back there six weeks later…the whole context is different”. This was different from how he described working with smaller teams, saying that with games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory it would be as simple as walking up to someone’s desk who was working on the project and talking to them.
Hocking would leave Ubisoft in February of 2026 after having worked with the company for twenty years. Ubisoft reacted to it saying, “We sincerely thank [Clint] for his vision, creative contributions, and dedication over the years, and we wish him the very best in his next chapter”. Hocking had briefly departed from Ubisoft to work with studios like LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon Games, before returning in 2015. Where Hocking is taking his career next is unclear, but hopefully he can bring the same energy with him that helped create games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory or Far Cry 2.