Epic delays its Marvel and Star Wars shooter and bans hand-written code

Epic Games has pushed back its first big Disney game, a shooter built around Marvel and Star Wars characters, and told the people making it to stop writing code by hand. According to Bloomberg, which saw internal messages, one of the game’s directors told staff there would be “no more hand-written code” and that the game’s art would be “generated with full AI workflows.” Developers will instead steer and correct what models such as Anthropic‘s Claude produce.

That makes the Fortnite maker the first major games company to try building a big-budget title with AI as the foundation of the whole production line, Bloomberg reported, rather than as a helper for brainstorming or rough concept sketches. For players, the question is simple: can a game made this way feel like anything other than a pile of generated assets? It is being asked with two of the most closely guarded brands in entertainment on the box.

Epic is not hiding where it is heading. “We’re embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do,” communications director Jake Jones said in a statement to Bloomberg. Chief executive Tim Sweeney went further on X shortly before the report appeared, writing that Epic has “a huge pivot underway” and is “moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration.”

Because Epic also makes Unreal Engine, the toolset that many other studios build their games on, the experiment reaches past one shooter. Sweeney framed it that way himself: the aim, he wrote, “isn’t to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.” He has argued before that AI disclosure labels like the ones Valve requires on Steam make no sense, because AI tools will be involved in nearly all future production.

The developers given the order were less certain. They learned of the change on a video call the previous week, and some were stunned, Bloomberg’s sources said; a few hoped it was not entirely serious. Others asked the question the memo did not answer: who catches and fixes the mistakes when both the code and the art come out of a model? Several doubted the plan would work at all.

The backstory makes the promise harder to take at face value. The game was already behind schedule before the AI directive, because Epic misjudged how many developers and how much time it would need, according to the same report. Epic also cut more than 1,000 jobs in March, blaming a downturn in Fortnite engagement. When one user asked Sweeney on X how the pivot squared with those layoffs, he did not reply. To another who said he was misreading the room, he answered: “Much of the room wants it to be 2016 again, but it’s not.”

The room he means is large. In this year’s Game Developers Conference survey of more than 2,300 industry professionals, 36 percent said they use generative AI at work, but mostly for research and brainstorming rather than for code or finished assets. Fifty-two percent said the technology is bad for the industry, up from 30 percent a year earlier, and games that ship with AI-generated content have drawn complaints from players who say the output is of lower quality.

Disney has a lot riding on the result. It invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024 in exchange for an equity stake, and this shooter was meant to open a multi-game partnership between the two. They have already seen AI misfire in public: an AI-voiced Darth Vader added to Fortnite in 2025 started repeating curse words until Epic pushed a hotfix. Disney did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment.

The shooter had been slated for March 2027. It now has no release date, and Epic has not said what the delay means for the size of the team still working on it.

Whenever it does ship, it will carry an unusual set of credits: Marvel heroes, Star Wars characters, Epic’s own engine, and code that, by order of one of its directors, nobody on the team was supposed to type by hand.

Tags: Disney, Marvel, Sam Altman, Star Wars, epic games, fortnite, Tim Sweeney, Unreal Engine