Report: Epic delays its Disney game and is going to shove all the gen-AI into it
by Stefan L · tsaEpic Games is reportedly going to lean heavily on generative AI to help it finish an internally delayed Star Wars and Marvel shooter.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier cites anonymous sources for his reporting that this Disney collaboration – possibly the extraction shooter mooted earlier this year – has been delayed from an early 2027 target. In order to try and speed things up, Epic has now told the team to use an “AI first” approach to further development.
An internal message that was seen by Bloomberg has told the developers that there will be “no more hand-written code” and that art will be “generated with full AI workflows”.
A statement from Epic communications director, Jake Jones, reads, “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do.”
Another side to this would be seeing a greater acceptance of AI and loosening of Disney’s strict controls over how their IP is used. Obviously, they’re not going to sanction Joe Public using gen-AI to produce kinky Mickey Mouse artwork, but Disney has signed with OpenAI to explore video generated using its properties on the Sora platfrom. Within a controlled environment, Disney seems to be fine with all of this.
The Fortnite maker has been gearing up for a shift towards generative AI use in game development, with Unreal Engine 6 set to fully integrate various generative AI development tools. With the engine’s reveal, they showed how image diffusion models could be overlaid on a flat image to lend it an underwater look to a room, or watercolour effect, and the studio at the time said, “We recently opened up pretty broad usage for code generation and AI analysis across our backend, engine, and game development engineering teams.”
While there’s a huge amount of pushback towards almost any game that is revealed to have used generative AI, tarring them with the ‘AI slop’ brush, it will remain to be seen how much of an impact that would have on a game that targets such broad mass market audiences. It’s likely that, filling the game with Star Wars and Marvel characters, and no doubt with some kind of crosspromotion through Fortnite, this game will reach a younger audience (and seek permission from parents) that simply wouldn’t care.
Source: Bloomberg