Game designer Alex Hutchinson, who served as game director on high profile projects like Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 4, has announced that he is leaving Ubisoft after being with the company for seven years. Instead of joining a rival company, Hutchinson is opening his own game development studio, Typhoon Studios, along with fellow game designer Reid Schneider and others.

During his time with Ubisoft, Hutchinson's work earned relatively strong reviews from the press, and most of his projects were huge financial successes. While both Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 4 fell a little short compared to their immediate predecessors in terms of critical reception, the games were still well-received and show that Hutchinson knows how to make a high quality AAA game.

Whether or not Typhoon Studios will be creating a high budget game in the vein of Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 4 remains to be seen. Typhoon Studios is an indie studio that has a lot less cash to throw around than Ubisoft, which could mean Hutchinson will have to scale back his vision for whatever game he decides to create next.

In later tweets, Hutchinson indicated that Typhoon Studios itself isn't even completely sure what its first game will be like. He said that the studio is "hard at work imaging a brand new world to inflict on all of you," indicating that the game is still in the earliest stages of design. So while it may take a couple of years to learn what Hutchinson and Typhoon Studios are creating, it will be interesting to see if he sticks to his bread and butter of open world games or decides to explore a different genre entirely.

While Hutchinson's most well-known projects have been open world games like Assassin's Creed 3 and Far Cry 4, it's possible that he will look to some of the earlier games he worked on for inspiration instead. Perhaps if Typhoon Studios doesn't create an open world game, it will work on a simulation game like Spore or The Sims 2, two games that Hutchinson worked on during his time with EA.

Whatever Hutchinson has in store, expectations will be high because of his past work in the industry. For now, fans of his previous games will have to sit tight and wait for Typhoon Studios to get to work on its first game.

We wish the former Ubisoft director the best luck in his new venture.