Clint Hocking, the creative force behind Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Watch Dogs Legion, has offered a blunt assessment of what it feels like to direct massive games at a sprawling studio. Working on projects with over a thousand people, he says, is like dodging flaming barrels tumbling down a construction site in an endless arcade game.
Hocking parted ways with Ubisoft earlier this year while overseeing development of Assassin's Creed Hexe, the franchise's next major release slated for 2027. The split came as part of a broader restructuring at the publisher's leadership level. Jean Guesdon, the franchise's Head of Content, has stepped into Hocking's role on the project.
In a podcast discussion, Hocking traced how his effectiveness as a director eroded as teams ballooned. On Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, he could walk to a colleague's desk and hash out details in real time, even something as granular as where to position a light source to guide player movement. Conversation was direct. Feedback was immediate.
Scale destroyed that dynamic. When reviewing a single quest or location on a sprawling project, Hocking found himself in a room with 30 people: directors, producers, project managers, and others. The person who actually built the content often wasn't even there. They were elsewhere, handling tasks for their next meeting. Notes got typed up, converted into digital task items, and sent through the system. Six weeks later, when iteration was promised, context had shifted. Priorities had changed. The original worker was busy elsewhere.
"It very often feels like those flaming barrels that Donkey Kong throws down at you," Hocking said. "Very often game development feels like this stream of burning barrels falling down from a construction site."
His tenure at Ubisoft spans multiple eras. He arrived in the early 2000s as a designer and scriptwriter on the original Splinter Cell, then took creative control of Chaos Theory before helming Far Cry 2. A stint away saw him work at LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon. He returned to Ubisoft to lead Watch Dogs: Legion in 2020, a title that received mixed reviews. Legion stands as his only shipped game since Far Cry 2 in 2008, a gap that underscores the grinding pace of modern AAA production.
Author Emily Chen: "Hocking's frustration speaks to a real fracture in how blockbuster games get made today, where creative vision gets buried under layers of process and scale that nobody asked for."
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