Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon creative director leaves Ubisoft after his latest project is cancelled

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon creative director Dean Evans has left Ubisoft after 12 years at the developer. He's worked across the Far Cry, Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed series, and was most recently working on a new game that Ubisoft has now cancelled. Following that cancellation, the company offered him a job in Paris, but he declined and will instead look to set up his own studio after taking a break from the industry.

“I split with my wife, and then the project I was working on was cancelled. All of this massive s**t going on at the same time and I started thinking, ‘Is the best option for me to move to another foreign country?'" he told GameInformer.

He said that he's left Ubisoft on good terms, and that he wants to take more risks in development in the future. “A lot of people have been complaining about the triple-A business and the lack of risk taking, that I’d be a total f***ing hypocrite if I moved forward and didn’t take any risks,” he says. “So f**k it, I think I might go out and set up my own studio and see where that goes.”

From the sounds of it, his future work will revolve around interactive spaces that encourage player creativity, rather than objective-based, scripted games. “I’m a big believer that the future is not games we as creators make, but that we create virtual worlds and give tools and systems to players and they’ll make infinite amounts of games,” he said. “We’re going to build spaces for players not just to play in, but to exist in. You’ll see it, in 10 years digital existence is going to be as important as your virtual existence.”

We know that Evans wanted to turn the bombastic Blood Dragon into a spin-off franchise, but we may never know whether that was the cancelled project that he was working on.

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Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.