Clint Hocking, who previously served as a director on Ubisoft's upcoming Assassin's Creed Hexe, has described the challenges of managing massive development teams, likening the experience on Watch Dogs: Legion to "pissing upstream." Hocking, who also helmed Far Cry 2 and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, shared his insights in a recent interview.
While Hocking was unable to discuss his work on Assassin's Creed Hexe due to an NDA, he elaborated on the difficulties encountered during the development of Watch Dogs: Legion. He contrasted the process with that of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, where direct communication with individual team members was possible. "During Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s development," Hocking recounted, "I was able to just walk over to the desk of a person who was making a thing and simply talk to them."
In contrast, managing the approximately 1,000-person team behind Watch Dogs: Legion often led to significant delays in feedback. "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. He noted that often, the individuals directly responsible for implementing changes, such as level designers, were not present in these review meetings. Instead, information would be relayed through multiple layers of directors, producers, and project managers.
This indirect communication pipeline meant that feedback could take as long as six weeks to reach the relevant staff. "Then, by the time you get back there six weeks later…the whole context is different," Hocking said. "It very often feels like pissing upstream." He suggested that this organizational structure led to a "disconnected" development process.
Hocking has since departed Ubisoft and founded his own indie studio, Build Machine Games. The challenges he outlined echo previous criticisms from other former Ubisoft developers regarding the studio's organizational practices and their impact on productivity.