Far Cry 2 vet Clint Hocking joins Valve

Clint Hocking has joined Valve, after leaving his creative director position at LucasArts a short time ago.

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Clint Hocking has joined the team at Valve. He was formerly a creative director at LucasArts, and before that a director at Ubisoft for Far Cry 2. His role at the company hasn't been detailed, but considering his past positions it seems likely that he'll be directing a new game eventually.

Hocking recently left LucasArts, and confirmed his new company with a tweet photo (via GamesIndustry.biz) of the Valve office. Whatever he was working on at LucasArts may still be in the works, as speculation of a continued project kicked up in regards to a set of hirings for a next-gen FPS.

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  • reply
    July 12, 2012 8:15 AM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, Far Cry 2 vet Clint Hocking joins Valve.

    Clint Hocking has joined Valve, after leaving his creative director position at LucasArts a short time ago.

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      July 12, 2012 8:23 AM

      Cool, FC2 was great, bring us more quality games, good stuff.

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      July 12, 2012 8:24 AM

      Oh...oh shit.

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      July 12, 2012 8:25 AM

      Oh damn. Well, this will be good.

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      July 12, 2012 8:31 AM

      Fucking awesome. I hope he ends up doing some kind of spiritual sequel to Far Cry 2 that's even more open. I haven't been too impressed with Far Cry 3 so far

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      July 12, 2012 8:32 AM

      I am disappoint, valve.

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      July 12, 2012 8:32 AM

      [deleted]

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      July 12, 2012 8:35 AM

      Far Cry 2 was such a generic game with awful, awful design decisions.

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        July 12, 2012 8:36 AM

        Kill yourself. Far Cry 2 is amazing despite it's flaws.

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          July 12, 2012 8:51 AM

          With each mission you had to drive the exact opposite side of the map which could literally take 15 minutes. I swear they did it on purpose to piss players off. A game with potential but not an amazing game.

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            July 12, 2012 10:27 AM

            Its like they took the feedback from Crysis that clearing the checkpoints was fun and turned it up to eleventy billion

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          July 12, 2012 8:52 AM

          Far Cry 2 was horrible, despite it's moments of brilliance. I mean fundamentally the game was flat out badly designed from head to toe, but there were some really great ideas in it.

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          July 12, 2012 8:57 AM

          Far Cry 2 is an abortion

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        July 12, 2012 8:52 AM

        Has your father disowned you yet?

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        July 12, 2012 8:55 AM

        No, no, no, no... it wasn't generic at all. Maybe the general look of it at times had a somewhat bland look just by the nature of the environment it takes place in. But there was nothing ordinary about the gameplay or design choices in that game. Even just from a purely graphical point of view, if you run that on a current machine and crank the settings up.. it still looks amazing today. I love the way when you sleep in your house is shows a scene just outside the building with the stars, suns and moon flipping through the sky in accelerated time... so cool. The game is full of cool stuff like that.

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          July 12, 2012 9:49 AM

          No the look of the game was great. It still is. I agree with that. The game itself was not. The missions were mostly generic and uninteresting. 3 second sprinting followed by 3 second dizziness was neat in theory, dumb, frustrating, and unfun in practice. Someone told me having nearly infinite weapon combos was great - but then you have to deal with jamming weapons which sucked. The open world was nice, but having unlimited enemy respawns, and forts/bases respawning immediately when you left that map quadrant was stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, and stupid. Drive through camp, kill enemies,3 minutes later when driving back through same area, everything is pristine and enemies are back. SWEET. The open world mechanic ended up working against itself for that very reason. Fuck taking your own vehicle anywhere because you'd just be chased by the ghosts of 100 AI's you've already killed. So the bus system was nice to get away from the retarded respawning, but that erased much of the open world system. And if I recall, once you fired a shot, enemies instantly spotted you, so they had infinite line of sight.

          The idea of Far Cry 2 was great. The implementation was atrocious.

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        July 12, 2012 8:56 AM

        While I wasn't really a big fan of the game, I would never call it generic.

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        July 12, 2012 8:58 AM

        it had such awesome emergent gameplay scenarios, but really lacked anything external to drive the player forward. i enjoyed the combat and crazy battles and some of the exploration but it needed more of a narrative that sent you to interesting areas regularly. games that rely mostly on the player to propel him or herself through the game usually fail to hook me after 3-4 hours.

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        July 12, 2012 9:00 AM

        You'd make an awful insurgent.

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        July 12, 2012 10:21 AM

        Look how wrong you are.

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        July 12, 2012 10:28 AM

        Yeah. A complete disappointment.

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        July 12, 2012 10:38 AM

        It was very similar to the first Assassins Creed to me, in the way that it was really interesting and fun but fizzled out real quick. They both turned into a very repetitive game rather quickly, even though you felt like there was a possibility of uniqueness that you just couldn't quite find.

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      July 12, 2012 8:36 AM

      I was wondering where he was going to land. This is the best news.

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      July 12, 2012 8:46 AM

      Can't wait for HL3 with respawnable combine checkpoints on every corner!

      I kid, I kid. FC2 had some great design elements. Can't wait to see what he'll do at Valve.

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        July 12, 2012 9:25 AM

        You mean like the last map of E2, and pretty much L4D?

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      July 12, 2012 8:58 AM

      This is awesome news, I can't wait to see what this guy comes up with their resources and long development cycles.

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      July 12, 2012 8:59 AM

      It is way too early to know what he will be working with Valve. Given that he was a Creative director I am going to guess he will be doing something similar on some unannounced game.

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      July 12, 2012 9:56 AM

      I only know this name because of idle thumbs

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      July 12, 2012 10:02 AM

      Normally I ignore this sort of game-biz news, but this news - it is the best news.

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      July 12, 2012 10:04 AM

      Wow. I thought that Star Wars 1313 game was his; maybe I was wrong.

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