Cursed for some unknown slight, Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory designer Clint Hocking has been doomed to wander the game Earth until the second coming of Ouya. Since leaving Ubisoft Montreal after FC2, he’s joined then left LucasArts, Valve, and Amazon Game Studios. As curses often compel people to, he’s come full circle.
Hocking today announced that he has joined Ubisoft, this time their Toronto studio. What he’s working on is a mystery, but he seems keen to set down roots.
Clint Hocking has been cursed by a witch and is now doomed to travel the games industry, joining new developers and then leaving before releasing a single game. In the last five years, the Far Cry 2 designer has joined and left LucasArts, joined and left Valve, and as of yesterday, joined and left Amazon Games Studios.
RPS Feature From The Archive
Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, we re-visit Kieron’s Dark Futures series, which spoke to the leaders of the immersive sim. This is part five, an essay written by Clint Hocking.
Clint Hocking’s career started with sending his resume into Ubisoft Monreal “on a lark”. Six week’s later, he’s working on the original Splinter Cell, ending up as a designer/scriptwriter. After its enormous success, he rose to the position of Creative Director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 before leaving this year to chase new horizons. Away from his game design, he’s a prolific essayist on his own blog. And in keeping in that, rather than a traditional interview, Clint has wrote us an essay…
RPS Feature Retrospective
You shouldn’t always give people what they want. This is focus testing’s fatal flaw. It’s also the reason that Far Cry 2 – a game which doesn’t give you what you want and slaps you for asking – is the best game in the series by far.
Clint Hocking, he of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, has departed from Valve after eighteen months working as a something or other designer and level designer. Meanwhile, Gabe Newell has been talking to noted videogame blog The Washington Post about the company’s structure and strategy. Observant readers will notice that this post contains two pieces of Valve news but not a shred of concrete information about any games in development. I reckon that’s why Hocking left – he designed a couple of levels every week but couldn’t find any games to put them in. After trying to drop a few into DOTA 2 when nobody was looking, he eventually left the building with a bag full of digital architecture.
The internet has decided that a picture on Clint Hocking’s twitter feed of his son at Valve’s industrial heart is confirmation that the Far Cry 2 designer is now absolutely definitely working for the Half Life honchos and most probably turning Episode Three into a work of divisive genius that throws out the baby and the bathwater, and then replaces them with something far more awesome than a tiny, dirty human. Maybe he’s just consulting, maybe he’s visiting a friend, but as he left his post at Lucasarts a couple of weeks back for “something new” the internet may well be right on this one. So, Clint Hocking is now lead designer of all development at Valve.
While he’s most known for the rightfully divisive Far Cry 2 (me, I’m glad it exists but never, ever want to play it again), Clint Hocking is a fascinating games-brain whose trajectory is well worth following. Not purely because he played a big role in the first three Splinter Cells, but also because interviews and talks suggest a restless, ambitious mind that seems taken up with the sort of emergent, open world, experimental experiences we generally crave here on RPS. So, while a bit odd, the news two years back that he was joining LucasArts was rather exciting. With Georgey-porgey’s bunch having lately dropped any number of balls both in terms of Star Wars and, well, anything else, Hocking’s presence was surely just what this hobbled giant needed. Only now he’s bally left without any projects coming to light.
Read the rest of this entry »
Splinter Cell 3 and Far Cry 2 lead Clint Hocking stood down from Ubisoft Montreal back in May, citing a need to challenge himself and to leave comfortable habits behind. The newly-announced upshot of that is that he’s moving to LucasArts, to be creative director on an unannounced project.
Read the rest of this entry »
“Cliff Blezinski, bless his heart, has no idea what it means to run across a battlefield underneath machinegun fire.” This is very true.
Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking once again demonstrates the pulsating mega-brain that will hopefully soon result in a game that isn’t a weird Far Cry sequel, in this rather special Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab talk. It’s from last October, but seems no less relevant for it. Discussed: war movies, hockey fights, Gears of War, Duke Nukem breaking the fourth wall without breaking immersion, how online functionality can augment immersion, and blurring the line between real and fake.
Read the rest of this entry »
Clint Hocking’s career started with sending his resume into Ubisoft Monreal “on a lark”. Six week’s later, he’s working on the original Splinter Cell, ending up as a designer/scriptwriter. After its enormous success, he rose to the position of Creative Director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 before leaving this year to chase new horizons. Away from his game design, he’s a prolific essayist on his own blog. And in keeping in that, rather than a traditional interview, Clint has wrote us an essay…
Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know about you lot, but all that Far Cry 2 coverage left me with a few questions about the game. So I dropped a line to Mr Clint Hocking, a creative director at Ubisoft Montreal, and the lead brain on Far Cry 2. He’s a clever sort, and was patient enough to talk about how non-linear storytelling works, how your NPCs buddies operate in the game world, how bits of a car can be your undoing, the potential for exploration in a 50km tract of videogame Africa, the “visceral punch” of the injury system, and how people will overlook the awesomeness of a guided missile system.
Read on for a verbal monsoon of all things Far Cry 2. This is a game worth paying attention to.
Lots of excellent new in-game footage here, with some detailed commentary by Clint Hocking. It turns out that you can even take a little nap to fast forward time. (And in the game! Aha!)
EDIT: You can check it out here since the embedded version seems to be broke.
Read the rest of this entry »
Certain game experiences seem to suggest other, older games, and leave me longing for them. Age Of Conan, which I’ve been playing a great deal for the PC Gamer review, somehow left me longing for Oblivion. There was something about the way that Age Of Conan tantalises you with elements of single player gaming that left me quite hungry for a proper RPG romp, and so I reinstalled the last Elder Scrolls game and plunged in.
To tell the truth, I’d been meaning to go back and play Oblivion a some point this year after being reminded of it in PC Gamer UK’s Top 100 meeting. Tom Francis had talked about the moment he’d be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It’s wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” It’s a feeling that, in some ways, is only possible in a game of Oblivion’s calibre. That kind of feeling could be an antidote to the pressures of real life, and definitely an antidote to too many hours in a traditional MMO. I wanted to recapture that, although I had wondered whether Francis’ was simply being hyperbolic. Was Oblivion better than I remembered?
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been resisting posting about Roger Ebert ever since he’s become as silly as those Epic-Verse aficionados Aristotle dissects in Poetics, but following his latest reiteration of his thoughts on games in his review of the Hitman movie, I decided it was inevitable I’d have a crack. Except I now realise I don’t have to. Following the thread on Rllmuk – where I steal Dapple’s splendid line for this post’s title – The Bag links to Splinter Cell Creative Director Clint Hocking’s extensive, elegant and intricate rebuttal. Which despite dating from August, I hadn’t read before. I probably should have, because it’s extensive, elegant and intricate. Also – whisper it – agreeably bolshy.
“If Haggis’ Best Picture winning Crash was 100 hours long, and contained 100 different interconnected plots all echoing the same themes of racial tension from different perspectives, would it suddenly lose its status as art? It probably wouldn’t be a very good movie, because 100 hours of movie is painful. In any case, no matter how long you make Crash, you will never fully explore the domain of the themes of racial tension in modern America. 100 hours is just 50x what the movie already offers, and is no closer to the infinite depth of the theme than is the existing 2 hour film. GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.”
On the same topic, I wrote a justification for games-as-expression back when the Escapist launched, which I think still stands up and explains that Poetics bit in the intro if you’re wondering if That Gillen Guy has gone and went a bit funny in the head again.
