The new game is reportedly a Marvel and Star Wars crossover, part of the $1.5 billion Disney–Epic partnership announced in 2024.(Image credit: Disney / Epic Games)

Everyone's saying the same thing about Epic’s AI-first Disney game – and it's not good

13 Oct 2026, 11:10 by https://www.creativebloq.com/author/ian-dean · Creative Bloq

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Epic Games faces backlash over its AI-first Disney game, with players questioning whether using AI to generate code and artwork will improve the final product. The unannounced project, reportedly a shooter bringing together Marvel and Star Wars characters, has been delayed indefinitely as Epic pushes developers towards AI-assisted production. For a company promising to let its teams build “MORE and BETTER stuff”, the reaction suggests gamers want to know what that AI will actually add.

According to a Bloomberg report, the game was pencilled in for March 2027, but developers have now been told to work to an “AI first” model using tools like Anthropic’s Claude, with one director reportedly telling staff there would be “no more hand-written code” and the artwork set to come out of full AI workflows, and if you head to Reddit to see how that’s landed, you’ll find players circling the same question over and over, which is what AI is actually bringing to games that makes any of this worth doing.

The big departure with this Epic announcement is the scale and intent. There's a difference between using AI to take some of the grunt work out of making a game and building a production pipeline around AI-generated content. Plenty of artists and developers can see the appeal of using AI to speed up repetitive tasks, help with coding or get through early concepts, leaving more time to refine the work that makes a game distinctive. Asking AI to generate the artwork itself is a different proposition, particularly when that artwork is part of what gives a game its identity.

(Image credit: Disney / Epic Games)

Why gamers are pushing back against AI-generated games

Over in the r/Marvel discussion, one of the most upvoted comments from monkeymad2 points out: “The leadership demanding “no handwritten code” will also have a negative effect on games (and software generally) both on the game being made & the industry as a whole” Another is blunter about what’s behind it all and simply writes: “Aaaaand I'm out.”

That worry crops up across gaming communities, mostly because there’s a big difference between AI helping developers get through their day and AI being the way the whole game gets made, and while some people are happy with the first part, many more are furious about the second.

Sweeney says more and better; fans say prove it

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has quickly defended the bigger AI plan, saying that after the report that Epic was moving developers around to maximise AI acceleration, the aim wasn’t to get the same amount of work out of fewer people, but to let everyone build “MORE and BETTER stuff”. AI tools could well help teams prototype ideas faster, take care of the boring repetitive jobs and make more ambitious games than they could before, but players don’t play prototypes or workflows; they play the finished thing, and so far nobody’s explained why it’ll be better rather than just cheaper and quicker to churn out.

It's why Sweeney's promise of “MORE and BETTER stuff” gets to the heart of the problem. More content is easy to understand as a production goal, but better is much harder to measure. A studio might use AI to generate assets faster, write code more quickly or give developers more time to experiment, but none of that automatically makes a game more enjoyable, its art more memorable, or its world more convincing.

The reaction in r/fuckepic is about as hostile as you’d expect, with commenters picking at the quality of AI-generated code, laying into Epic’s leadership and tying the whole thing back to the company’s earlier job cuts, and the timing doesn’t do Epic any favours there because it announced 1,000 job cuts in March 2026, which makes “this isn’t about doing more with fewer people” a tough line to sell. Add that not everyone was sold on a Marvel and Star Wars crossover shooter in the first place (one commenter in the Marvel thread said as much, and that was before the AI news landed), and this project is carrying a lot of baggage before anyone’s seen a single frame.

Artists raise concerns about AI-generated artwork

Artist Karla Ortiz, who has worked on Loki, Doctor Strange, Eternals, Forspoken, FFXVI, and Magic: The Gathering, and has been a vocal opponent of AI responded on X, writing: “All Artistic GenAi models are trained off the works of artists like myself. This was done so without our credit, consent or compensation. Which is why artists like myself are suing GenAi companies.”

For artists like Ortiz, the argument over AI-generated artwork goes beyond whether the results look good. One of the biggest concerns is that generative AI models are trained on existing images, including work artists may not have agreed to use for that purpose. That raises difficult questions about consent, credit and compensation, particularly when the technology can produce images that imitate the visual language of working illustrators.

This also raises the question of what happens to the people whose work made these systems possible if studios increasingly turn to AI-generated assets instead of commissioning artists, and it also raises the issue of originality and stagnation: AI can't create, only replicate, so where does Epic's Disney game go without artists?

Reddit isn’t the whole gaming audience, and not every player is against AI in development, but the threads do show how fast a studio’s production choices can turn into part of a game’s pitch, and right now Epic’s pitch is that handing the work to AI will give its developers more creative freedom, which is a promise it’ll need to back up with something playable.

Ortiz’s response also highlights the legal and ethical concerns many gamers, artists, and creators have about how AI has been trained, and includes artists like; it’s a position that isn’t going away and one Epic Games will need to consider, though everyone is aware AI will have the biggest impact on the future of gaming.

When will Epic's Disney game be released?

Of course, there’s no finished Disney game to judge it against, and no new release date has been announced, according to the reporting currently available, so “MORE and BETTER stuff” will be measured against the game when it actually releases, and right now there isn’t a game to judge.