During a career at Ubisoft that spanned more than a decade, Patrik Méthé worked on series like Far Cry, Rainbow Six, and Splinter Cell. Now, he’s the creative director on Krafton Montréal’s Project Windless, an upcoming action RPG in which you play as a big, beefy rooster. If you’ve read the Korean fantasy novel series that Project Windless is adapting, Lee Youngdo’s The Bird That Drinks Tears, the choice of protagonist may seem odd, as Krafton Montréal could have chosen any of its other three main races, which are not chickens, for its lead role.
In a recently published interview with PC Gamer, Méthé revealed the reason behind the team’s choice of leading man/chicken: every single potential hire Méthé interviewed thought it would be cool. “When every candidate was leaving, they would say, ‘I hope I will hear from you, but one thing for sure, I want to be able to play that character.’ All of them. All of them—and we were like, ‘OK.’”
Still, Méthé wasn’t certain that the team had made the correct choice until the first trailer for Project Windless premiered at Sony’s State of Play on February 13. “We knew that the hero would create a shock, but I was surprised by the amount of people who were like, ‘What the f—huh?,‘ but then were like, ‘I’m in,’ before three quarters of the trailer had even played.”
In a recent PC Gamer interview, Alex Hutchinson, another ex-Ubisoft creative director who worked on Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4, said, “[Ubisoft] always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along. They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer. They had nothing new to come through.” Ex-Ubisoft employees have a habit of creating new and exciting games after leaving the studio; Sandfall Interactive, the developers behind 2025’s record-breaking awards darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was founded by several former Ubisoft team members.
In a separate interview, Méthé commented on his transition from working at Ubisoft for over thirteen years, starting with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction in 2009 and ending with Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Extraction in 2022, to working on a medieval fantasy game starring a cockerel. “It’s something that people can take for granted, but because I have a long career I know it’s a rare opportunity to create something new: not with a follow-up, not with a sequel, not with a copy of something else—to have the means and the support to say, ‘You know what? Here’s the universe, create something new.’”