Ubisoft’s latest bout of executive musical chairs continues with a report that Clint Hocking, creative director of Far Cry 2, Watch Dogs Legion, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe, has left the company.

We have Very Gary Computing to thank for this bit of scuttlebutt. Apparently, Hocking’s departure was communicated to staff this week by Assassin’s Creed’s new leadership team. Jean Guesdon, the brand’s just-appointed head of content, will take over as creative director for Hexe.

“We sincerely thank [Clint] for his vision, creative contributions, and dedication over the years, and we wish him the very best in his next chapter,” a spokesperson has told VGC. “Development on Assassin’s Creed Codename Hexe continues with a seasoned team. The game will deliver something distinctive within the Assassin’s Creed franchise. We look forward to sharing more information in the future.”

You might know Hocking as the guy who coined the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, describing the conflict between the game you play and the story it tells you. You might also know him as patron saint of the “grenade rolled back down hill” species of immersive/emergent sim. Interesting fellah. Here’s a chunk from an essay he wrote for RPS, many moons ago:

I believe that the players’ agency is sacred. I believe there is no part of a game too important to play with. While some seek to make a straw man of this stance by suggesting I am in favour of shipping uncompiled code and calling it a game, I find that to be a greedy reduction of the argument. The game does not lie in code – compiled or otherwise. The game is what is happening inside the player, and the reality is it was never ‘our game’ to protect from ruin in the first place.

While I’m mixed on Hocking’s more recent games, I was vaguely looking forward to hearing him talk about Hexe. Announced in 2022, it appears to take Ubisoft’s covert stabbing series into the realm of occult horror, with twisty wicker emblems. According to reporting at the time of announcement,the game is set during the witch trials of the Holy Roman Empire.

Assuming VGC are on the level, and they tend to be, Hocking’s departure is part of Ubisoft’s bloody transformation into a group of “creative houses”. The publishers have cancelled several games, closed studios, and laid a number of developers off in the process. One departed Assassin’s Creed exec, Marc-Alexis Côté, is now suing Ubisoft for £1 million, claiming he was forced out. Company CEO Yves Guillemot has stressed the importance of “disciplined workforce management, even as Ubisoft appoint his son to co-run the company’s new flagship studio.