Clint Hocking, who left his role as director of Assassin's Creed Hexe in February 2026, has described challenges with managing large development teams at Ubisoft. In an interview, he highlighted inefficiencies during work on Watch Dogs: Legion. Hocking now leads his own studio, Build Machine Games.
Clint Hocking served as creative director on several Ubisoft titles, including Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Watch Dogs: Legion. He stepped down from Assassin's Creed Hexe earlier this year and founded Build Machine Games.
During the interview with FRVR, Hocking compared his experience on smaller projects to the roughly 1,000-person team on Watch Dogs: Legion. He noted that direct communication was possible on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory but became difficult with larger groups.
Hocking described review meetings involving up to 30 people where the level designer was often absent. Feedback would then take six weeks to reach the relevant staff, leading him to equate the process to “pissing upstream.” He was not permitted to discuss Assassin's Creed Hexe during the conversation.
