Alex Hutchinson, known for his work as creative director on Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed 3 believes that Ubisoft might have grown “very allergic” to making brand new games. In an interview with PCGamer, he spoke about leaving Ubisoft in 2017, as well as the general talent drain that has affected the company.
“It’s a shame. I think a bunch of things happened,” he said. “The style of development we pioneered was being able to manage big teams by letting them be individual groups with ownership of their own thing, to allow us to make bigger games faster. But then I think with the recent boom, there’s been a weird five year boom in private equity and investment from people which we hadn’t seen before ever. So a lot of senior people left Ubisoft and started studios or splintered off. So there was this talent drain that went out.”
The departure of talented employees, along with the generally massive size of Ubisoft’s development teams all contributed to Ubisoft’s current state, according to Hutchinson. He noted that, with a team of 800 people, it becomes difficult to manage everyone. The pandemic-era work-from-home culture also played a role, he said, leading to junior developers not being able to learn and not asking questions.
“If you have a team of 800 people, it’s really hard to manage, even if they’re in the same building,” he said. “If they’re not coming to work, how do you police them? How do you make sure what’s going on is going on? And then juniors don’t learn because they like working from home, and they don’t like asking questions. So I think they lost that momentum as well.”
As for the lack of new IP, Hutchinson noted that, while Ubisoft still released several sequels, it also made new games that would explore fresh ideas. This, however, has been toned down quite a bit, leading to cancellations.
“They always had a history of sequelizing the franchises, but also having a couple of new things coming along. They became very allergic to the new things, and so they killed a bunch of our ideas, like when I was working on Pioneer. They had nothing new to come through.”
Hutchinson is describing a planned sci-fi game, Pioneer, that was meant to focus on exploration rather than featuring too much combat. The game was even teased in 2016’s Watch Dogs 2. Unfortunately, it never saw the light of day. While Hutchinson was taken off the project back in 2016, its eventual cancellation would come in 2019.
Hutchinson had also spoken about the long development time for Skull and Bones, despite the core sailing and naval combat mechanics being designed for 2012’s Assassin’s Creed 3. He said that it was “bizarre to see essentially the same stuff re-shipping 14 years after we made it.” Ultimately, he believes the title took too long to develop due to the fact that the team working on it—Ubisoft Singapore—simply lacked the experience needed to make a multiplayer version of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag.
