Epic tells its Disney shooter team "no more hand-written code", and Sweeney says the AI push will reach Unreal

Epic has delayed its Marvel and Star Wars shooter and moved it to "AI first" production, Bloomberg reports. Tim Sweeney says Epic wants to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.

AI-drafted from 4 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

Epic Games has delayed its unannounced shooter starring Marvel and Star Wars characters and told the team making it to work "AI first", Bloomberg reported on 12 October. According to PC Gamer's account of the report, the game had been aimed at March 2027 and now has no release date.

Staff learned of the change last week. Bloomberg quotes an internal message from one of the game's directors saying "No more hand-written code" and that all of the game's art would be "generated with full AI workflows". The instructions name tools such as Anthropic's Claude, with developers expected to oversee what the tools produce. Bloomberg's sources said some on the team were "stunned".

The same sources put the delay down to Epic underestimating the staff and time the game would need, Game Dev Wire reports. The shooter is meant to be the first release from the partnership that followed Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic in 2024. Epic laid off more than 1,000 people in March. Asked about the AI plan, Epic communications director Jake Jones told Bloomberg the company is "embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers for everything we do." Disney did not immediately respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

Why Unreal developers should care

The story is bigger than one licensed game because of what Tim Sweeney said next. Posting on X shortly after the report, Epic's chief executive wrote: "We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration. The aim 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 described Epic's role as "the provider of tools and technology to much of the industry", and said its job is "to design for the present that is and the future that will soon be." On how much faster AI makes work today, he said it is "highly variable, from 20% in some areas (like the most technical areas of UE dev) to 5x for other areas (like web dev)", and that he expects "very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency" by this time next year. He argued the biggest change will be a much shorter path from an idea to a playtest.

Sweeney's posts give no detail on what will change in Unreal Engine itself, and Superpower Daily points out that nothing so far shows AI has sped up the Disney game, which is now later than planned. For the many small studios that build on Unreal, the clear signal is that the company behind their engine now says its own direction is AI first, and its first large test of that is a game that has just slipped.

Sources

Image: Sergey Galyonkin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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