Assassin's Creed Hexe Director used ChatGPT to learn coding

From the outside, Assassin's Creed Hexe looks pretty interesting. An AC game set during the Holy Roman Empire's witch trials sounds neat, and it seems everyone at the studio wants to be a part of it. However, the development does not seem to be going well. The project has already lost two of its leads and around 50 developers.

One of the former leads was creative director Clint Hocking, and no reason was given for his departure. Although we can only guess what happened, Hocking recently talked about the use of AI in game development. He not only said that the integration will be inevitable, but also admitted that he used ChatGPT to learn how to code. However, he admitted that it “sucked”.

Former Assassin's Creed Hexe Creative Director tried to learn coding through ChatGPT

Ezio performing the Assassin's Creed Hexe teaser.

In an interview with Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar+), Hocking said he used AI to help him learn to code. “It was brutal. ChatGPT was a little bit hungry. It didn't really know how to code. Everything was broken,” he said. “It was mostly me trying to debug code without knowing how to code myself.”

But after a year and a half, Hocking gave up on ChatGPT and learned how to code with Javascript. As for whether AI helped in the process, he said that “he learned to code despite ChatGPT.” It sounds like the tool was more of a hindrance than a facilitator. Thankfully, he has since given up vibe coding.

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This does not mean that Hocking intended to use AI-generated coding in Hexe or any of his other games. It was probably an attempt to learn to code on my own. Thankfully, he realized that ChatGPT is not the best way to do it.

Speaking of Ubisoft and AI, an insider recently revealed that the studio was experimenting with generative AI for the next Far Cry game, and it was also “hungry.” It was later revealed that this was only done for “research and development processes”.