Assassin's Creed Hexe's former creative director Clint Hocking, an industry veteran who left publisher Ubisoft just a few short months ago, says workers at the company weren't being replaced by AI during his tenure.
Hocking served as a lead on both Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, before working at a few non-Ubisoft publishers and eventually circling back as the creative director for both Watch Dogs Legion and the still very mysterious Assassin's Creed Hexe.
When asked about the advent of generative AI in game development, in a feature published in Edge Magazine, Hocking says he didn't see an instance of developers losing jobs directly due to generative AI, at least not on the Assassin's Creed Hexe corner of the company.
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"It's not like on the team where I was working until a month ago, a third of my co-workers were AI, or that my team had laid off a third of its staff and we were doing the same amount of work," he recalls. "That's just factually untrue."
It's worth noting that companies like Ubisoft are unlikely to tell workers they're being laid off so an algorithm can take their place - the multiple rounds of Ubisoft layoffs this year alone were pinned on outside factors, though CEO Yves Guillemot said the publisher would see "accelerated investments behind player-facing Generative AI" at the same time.
At least from as far as Hocking could see, AI-development at Ubisoft was relegated to tools and wasn't relied upon to generate assets. "Ubisoft has internal groups working on developing AI-assisted tools to help game developers do their jobs more efficiently," he explains "... it's never [the case that] someone generates a character model and we put it in the game."
Just months after his departure from the company, Hocking announced an all-new indie game studio aiming to make "emotionally resonant, socially relevant games."
Assassin’s Creed Hexe will be a "darker" installment "set during a pivotal moment in history," but Ubisoft says it's "taking the time to deliver."
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