Former Assassin’s Creed Hexe Director Shares Challenges of Managing 1,000-Person Teams

Clint Hocking, one of the two directors who left Ubisoft during the development of Assassin’s Creed Hexe, recently shared his thoughts on managing the massive development team for Watch Dogs: Legion, likening it to “pissing upstream.” In a candid interview, he reflected on the frustrating experience of attending meetings with “directors and producers” who merely passed along information to someone not even present.

In his conversation, Hocking discussed his tenure at Ubisoft, where he was the creative force behind titles like Far Cry 2, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and Watch Dogs: Legion. After stepping down as director of Assassin’s Creed Hexe in February 2026, he has since launched his own indie studio, Build Machine Games.

While he was unable to delve into specifics about Assassin’s Creed Hexe, Hocking did shed light on the “disconnected” development process of Watch Dogs: Legion. He reminisced about the collaborative environment during the making of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, where he could easily approach team members to discuss their work. In stark contrast, the sheer size of the Watch Dogs: Legion team often meant that feedback would take “six weeks” to reach the right people.

“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.”

He elaborated, “So there are people there just writing down what you say and making tasks out of it. Then you finish the review, and you ask, ‘When are we going to see the iterations and improvements we discussed?’ And they respond, ‘Well… it’s going to be six weeks before we see an iteration on this because the person who needs to do it is busy with something else.’ By the time you revisit it six weeks later, the whole context has changed. It often feels like pissing upstream.”

This isn’t the first instance of a former Ubisoft developer criticizing the studio’s organizational structure as being less than ideal for productivity. It will be interesting to see what Hocking reveals about the development of Assassin’s Creed Hexe once any non-disclosure agreements he may be under expire in the hopefully near future.