Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Far Cry 2, and Watch Dogs: Legion lead Clint Hocking feels there’s a massive “disconnect” in AAA development. After working on Watch Dogs Legion, Hocking explains that he felt this disconnect as he sat in 30-person content meetings without being able to give feedback to the workers behind the content that was being discussed.

Hocking, who recently departed Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Hexe to found new studio Build Machine Games, recalled Watch Dogs Legion’s massive team size causing issues for iterative development. Whereas, in his early career, Hocking could simply walk to a designer or artist’s desk to review work, Legion saw meetings of content with a room full of people who never worked on it.

Alongside discussing the perils of modern stealth and why he won’t return to Splinter Cell, Hocking spoke in an upcoming episode of the FRVR Podcast about his thoughts on massive AAA game development. Whereas huge film projects are always backed by a director with a vision, Hocking argues that game development is the opposite in some cases.

“When I’ve been a creative director, I’ve always tried to carve a piece of actual work off for myself and stuff that I can actually put in the build,” Hocking told us. “It’s too important to me to be in contact with the tools and to have real hands-on problems to solve. I really like it. I think you can’t let yourself become out of touch.”

“One of the challenges is, as teams get bigger there’s more and more pressure for the director, the creative director, to become kind of a director of directors,” Hocking continued. “I don’t actually really like this job very much because I feel like it disconnects you from the content. And I think it risks making you kind of an irrelevant creative executive and I don’t want to—that’s not the way I want to work, right?”

“There’s 30 people in the meeting… and, very often, even the level designer who’s built it isn’t even in the meeting.”

Splinter Cell designer Chris Hocking on AAA development

The Splinter Cell designer explains that this is unique to games. Looking at movie directors like Spielberg, Lynch, or Nolan, they are wise to many parts of a film’s production. At the end, their stamp on the film is noticeable. On big-budget games, a director’s stamp is often faded, and there’s little evidence they were involved outside of a large credit. 

“Very often, the director of the movie is very, very hands-on in some part. Maybe they’re a cinematographer themselves and they still have a cinematographer, but they spend a lot of time looking down the camera and calling the framing and working with the cinematographer… very often, in film, a director is also an expert in one of the other crafts that are being brought to bear in the making of the film.”

Hocking argues that, as the size of game development has ballooned, that’s not the case on a number of AAA titles. “In games, I think there’s a lot more pressure once teams get to 500, 600, 700, 1000 people,” he said, “to push the creative director off that stuff and then the question becomes: ‘Okay, you can do that, but after 10-years of doing that, do you understand anything about how the rendering is working? Do you understand anything about how the AI behaviour trees are working? Do you understand anything about how game ingredients are built, how states propagate.’

“All of that stuff, these low-level things, are what the game is made out of, right? Like, you have to understand these things or what are you painting with. The original Splinter Cell, I think we were 60 [people]. [Watch Dogs Legion] I think we were north of 750. Between 750 and a thousand. It gets into the question of how do you count it at some point, right?”

Hocking recalled that Watch Dogs Legion’s development was filled with little scenarios that made the inefficiencies of AAA development apparent. “On [Splinter Cell] Chaos Theory, I would just walk over to the desk of the person who was making a thing and sit down with them. And talk to them about what they’re doing, and maybe there’s a way to improve it, or to fix this, or to change that, or do they think about this. We can have a conversation about what the best way to do the thing is. What’s the best place to put this light? Because I always come from this direction and the guard’s always there and the timing seems really wonky. Let’s see if we can fix this so that we get make it clearer or whatever, right?”

That’s the way AAA game development used to be twenty years ago. Now, though, AAA game development is a much bigger space. On Watch Dogs Legion, the size of the dev team is multitudes higher, and some of those devs aren’t even in the same country. Hocking recalls the endless meetings, reviewing content in a stricter, less playful setting where the designer of said content would not even be attending.

“On a huge game with a thousand people, you go into a meeting to review some piece of content, some quest, say, or some location, and there’s 30 people in the meeting and directors and producers and product and project managers and, very often, even the level designer who’s building, who built it, isn’t even in the meeting. And it’s like: ‘where’s the person who worked on this? Oh, they’re working on the thing they need to do for their next meeting! Okay, but don’t worry, we’ll take notes and put it in Jira for them.’

“So, there’s people there just writing down what you say and making tasks out of it. And then you finish the review, and you say, ‘Okay, well then when are we going to see the iterations and the improvements that we talked about?’ And they’re like, ‘well we got to do this and this and this and this and then we’ll put it in the thing and it’s like so it’s going to be six weeks before we see an iteration on this because the person who needs to do the iteration is working on this.’ And then, by the time you get back there six weeks later, it’s like well maybe the whole context is different.”

The game designer explained AAA game development as feeling like “the flaming barrels that Donkey Kong throws at you”, adding that it’s “this stream of burning barrels falling down a construction site.” There’s no longer the one-to-one connection that made Chaos Theory perfect. On huge games, some workers may never even meet the creative director, and that makes personal growth hard.

Hocking added that AAA game development, at least on that scale, is “very, very disconnected”, but there’s still fun to be had. On Watch Dogs Legion, the designer worked alongside very talented developers to create its Play As Anyone system. While the game wasn’t Hocking’s best work, the system’s innovative nature and the problem-solving it added kept a team of a thousand engaged for five years, which the designer admits is a prominent issue for many AAA titles.