Former Ubisoft game designer and director Clint Hocking is the latest industry veteran to chime in on the thorny matter of using generative AI in game development. Speaking to EDGE Magazine (July 2026, issue 424), Hocking opined that the technology will inevitably be used (as former industry executive Peter Moore recently said), so the question really is how best to support the transition for the good of society.
Hocking left Ubisoft earlier this year after working for some time on Assassin's Creed Hexe. In the interview, he noted that Ubisoft is developing internal AI-powered tools to make the studios more efficient, not to replace human employees wholesale.
The questions I wish people would ask aren't about whether we should or should not use this technology. I think the genie is out of the bottle. The question is: how do we ensure humanity is supported as we transition from a society where 90 per cent of people are agricultural workers to only ten per cent, as this technology has a transformative impact on our society?
Ubisoft has internal groups working on developing AI-assisted tools to help game developers do their jobs more efficiently. It's never the case that someone generates a character model and we put it in the game. It's not like on the team where I was working until a month ago, a third of my coworkers were AI, or that my team had laid off a third of its staff, and we were doing the same amount of work. That's just factually untrue.
Hocking's last released game was 2020's Watch Dogs: Legion, the most recent instalment in the action/adventure series focused on hacking and the impact of technology on society. Legion's main gameplay feature was that players could recruit almost every non-player character in the fictional London and make them playable characters. Looking back, Hocking reckons LLMs could have helped with that, if only the technology had been ready when the game was being developed.
We were talking about playing as anyone, and we were confronting the problem of how we were going to have all of these characters having their own voices and their own stories. We had real discussions: ‘Are there ways to generate this stuff?’ We did some investigations, and we realised it was a bridge too far. Now, had we been four years later, and had access to things like the early versions of LLMs, would we have gone deeper in investigating it? ‘Can we generate what these people say? Can we generate what voices that they have?’ I think we very well might have, depending on what the cultural climate was.
The last part of his statement actually hits the bullseye: many hardcore gamers have voiced their disapproval of AI-assisted game development, as seen earlier this year with the infamous Larian backlash. Most companies are moving forward anyway, as shown by Sony openly embracing AI through its own first-party studios.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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