Clint Hocking, the first of two directors to part ways with Ubisoft during Assassin’s Creed Hexe’s development, has equated managing Watch Dogs: Legion’s 1,000ish-person development team to “pissing upstream” in a new interview, during which he recounted attending pointless meetings with “directors and producers” who would simply relay info to someone who wasn’t “even in the meeting.”
Hocking sat down with FRVR to discuss his time working at Ubisoft, during which he served as the creative director behind Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Watch Dogs: Legion. Since stepping down as Assassin’s Creed Hexe’s director in February 2026, Hocking has founded a new indie studio, Build Machine Games.
However, as the host of FRVR’s podcast noted, Hocking was, for whatever reason, not allowed to talk about his time working on Assassin’s Creed Hexe. That didn’t stop him from talking about the “disconnected” process behind the scenes on Watch Dogs: Legion’s development, though.
Hocking recounted how he was able to “just walk over to the desk of a person who was making a thing” and simply “talk to them” during Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s development. In contrast, managing the 1000ish-person development team of Watch Dogs: Legion often resulted in feedback getting back to relevant staff “six weeks later.”
“On a huge game with 1,000 people, you go into a meeting to review some piece of content, or quest, or some location, and there’s 30 people in the meeting,” Hocking explained. “Directors and producers and project managers…and very often the level designer who built it isn’t even in the meeting.”
“So there’s people there just writing down what you say and making tasks out of it,” he continued. “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. It very often feels like pissing upstream.”
This isn’t the first time that a former Ubisoft developer has accused the studio of being organized in ways that are not exactly conducive to productivity. I can only imagine how much Hocking will have to say about Assassin’s Creed Hexe’s development, or lack thereof, once the NDA he is presumably under runs out in the hopefully not-so-distant future.
