Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell improvement veteran Clint Hocking has described the expertise of main a giant staff inside Ubisoft as like working whereas “flaming barrels [are] falling down from a building web site,” akin to a scene from the arcade recreation Donkey Kong.
Hocking made the remark as a part of a prolonged dialogue about how his position modified as improvement staff sizes grew, main him to really feel much less efficient whereas main Ubisoft’s multi-studio effort on Watch Dogs Legion.
Hocking and Ubisoft parted methods abruptly earlier this 12 months amid a reshuffle on the high of the writer’s prized Assassin’s Creed model, regardless of being in the course of main improvement on Assassin’s Creed Hexe. The franchise’s subsequent blockbuster, Hexe is known to nonetheless be heading in the right direction to arrive in 2027.
“On [Splinter Cell] Chaos Concept, I might simply stroll over to the desk of the one who was making a factor, and sit down with them and speak to them about what they’re doing,” Hocking recalled, talking by way of the FRVR podcast.
“We might have a dialog,” he continued, suggesting a state of affairs the place he was in a position to supply granular enter comparable to the position of a particular gentle supply to higher information participant motion.
“However on a big recreation with 1,000 individuals, you go into a assembly to overview some piece of content material — some quest, say, or some location — and there is 30 individuals within the assembly,” Hocking continued. “Administrators and producers and undertaking managers, and fairly often even the extent designer who constructed it is not even within the assembly.
“And it is like, ‘the place’s the one who labored on this?’ ‘Ah, they’re engaged on the factor they want to do for his or her subsequent assembly. However don’t be concerned we’ll take notes and put it in Jira for them.’ So there’s individuals there writing down what you say, making duties of it.
“You then end the overview, you say, ‘OK, when are we going to see the iterations and the enhancements we talked about?’ And so they’re like, ‘Effectively… so it is going to be six weeks earlier than we see an iteration on this as a result of the one who wants to do the iteration is engaged on this [other thing].’ Then, by the point you get again there six weeks later, perhaps the entire context is completely different. It fairly often appears like… you understand these flaming barrels that Donkey Kong throws down at you? Fairly often recreation improvement appears like this stream of burning barrels falling down from a building web site.”
Hocking initially joined Ubisoft to work on the legendary 2002 stealth motion journey Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, which he contributed to as a designer and scriptwriter. Hocking then served as artistic director on its follow-up, Splinter Cell: Chaos Concept, earlier than holding the identical position on Far Cry 2.
Throughout a interval away from Ubisoft, Hocking served years at LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon. Hocking then returned to Ubisoft to serve as soon as once more as a artistic director, this time on Watch Dogs: Legion, which launched in 2020 to a combined response. Following that, Hocking moved over to Assassin’s Creed, and had been main work on Hexe out of the corporate’s Montreal studio. Legion stays Hocking’s solely shipped title since Far Cry 2 again in 2008.
Hocking’s position main Assassin’s Creed Hexe has now been taken up by Jean Guesdon, the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s Head of Content material, who’s seen as a regular and expertise hand with a prolonged monitor file engaged on quite a few titles within the sequence.
Picture by ROBYN BECK/AFP by way of Getty Photographs.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s Information Editor. You may attain Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or discover him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social