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Former Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs Director Likens Large-Scale Game Development to Working With ‘Flaming Barrels Falling Down From a Construction Site,’ Months After Parting Ways With Ubisoft
Former Ubisoft creative director Clint Hocking has said that leading development on very large video games can feel chaotic and inefficient, comparing it to avoiding “flaming barrels” in Donkey Kong. His comments matter because they highlight how growing team sizes and multi-studio production can make direct creative oversight slower and more detached from the people building individual features.
Hocking contrasted this with his work on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, when he could speak directly to developers and give detailed feedback. On Watch Dogs: Legion, which involved around 1,000 people, reviews could include 30 managers while the relevant level designer was absent, and requested changes might take six weeks to appear; Hocking left Ubisoft earlier in 2026 while leading Assassin’s Creed Hexe, which is reportedly still planned for 2027.
In short
- Hocking says huge game teams can make creative feedback painfully slow.
- Watch Dogs: Legion’s scale illustrated the management challenges.
- Assassin’s Creed Hexe remains expected in 2027.
Steelman: both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Large-scale game development's current hierarchical structures create unnecessary bottlenecks that impede both creativity and efficiency, as Hocking's example illustrates—feedback reviews excluding the actual creators and changes taking six weeks to implement represent bureaucratic waste rather than necessary coordination. Smaller, more tightly managed teams with direct creative oversight have historically produced critically acclaimed games, suggesting that some of the overhead in modern AAA development is detrimental rather than essential. The fragmentation of communication undermines design quality and developer morale, making the case for leaner, more agile structures.
The case against
Modern AAA games demand teams spanning multiple continents and studios, with thousands of developers coordinating intricate systems across multiple platforms and technologies; such scale cannot be achieved with the smaller team structures of earlier eras. The management hierarchies and review processes that Hocking criticises, whilst imperfect, serve necessary functions in maintaining alignment, quality control, and consistency across unprecedented complexity. These systems have demonstrably produced games of higher commercial and critical success than previous generations, suggesting their overhead, though sometimes cumbersome, is the justified cost of realising projects of this ambition.
Explained simply
Clint Hocking is a video game director who spent many years at Ubisoft, a major games publisher, working on significant franchises including Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs, as well as on smaller productions earlier in his career. He departed Ubisoft earlier this year whilst directing the next Assassin's Creed title.
The video games industry has undergone substantial changes over recent decades, with development teams expanding from groups of dozens to organisations comprising hundreds or thousands of people working across multiple locations. This expansion enables studios to create more visually sophisticated and ambitious games, but it can also introduce challenges in how decisions are made and feedback is communicated within such large teams.
Hocking's career is particularly relevant here, as he has firsthand experience of how game development worked when teams were much smaller compared with how it operates today with massive productions. His perspective on the evolution of development approaches provides context for understanding his observations about contemporary game production.
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