Epic Games has once again postponed the release of its new shooter, which is being developed together with Disney. The game, which is expected to feature characters from the Marvel and Star Wars universes, no longer has a release date. It was previously planned for March 2027, and before that for November 2026. According to journalists, it will be an extraction shooter, in which players gather resources and try to leave the map alive.
The delay stems from a change in development approach. According to reports, during a video meeting the project's director told the team that production would shift to a model in which artificial intelligence plays the central role. Employees were instructed to stop writing code by hand and to create all graphics using neural networks. Specialists will only review and guide the output produced by such tools as Claude, the language model developed by Anthropic. Epic Games' communications director Jake Jones confirmed that the company supports accelerating development with AI, but that creative vision remains in the hands of its employees.
According to the press, the decision has stunned the team. Many developers doubt the project will succeed and do not understand how they are supposed to fix errors in code and graphics produced by a neural network. Development was already moving more slowly than planned: Epic Games underestimated how much time and how many people the game would require.
Epic Games chief Tim Sweeney commented on the news on the social network X. He said the company is undergoing a "massive pivot," with developers being reassigned to accelerate work with AI as much as possible. In his words, the goal is to make more and better products, not to do the same with fewer people.
Many want it to be 2016 again, but it isn't.
— Tim Sweeney, Epic Games chief
For Disney, which invested $1.5 billion in Epic Games in 2024 to build its own gaming universe, this project is of great importance. Disney did not respond to a request for comment from journalists.
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