Epic delays its Marvel and Star Wars shooter to go all-in on AI

Epic Games has reportedly delayed its Disney-licensed shooter, a project that has not yet been officially announced, after asking its teams to adopt a way of working that puts artificial intelligence front and center. The game, which according to reports would bring together characters from Marvel and Star Wars, was initially targeting March 2027. Following the change of direction, no new release window is known. The original report comes from Gamereactor Spain, which in turn picks up what Insider Gaming published based on reporting by Bloomberg.

Why does it matter? Because we are not talking about a small studio testing out tools, but about the company behind Fortnite and Unreal Engine, the engine on which a large part of the industry is built. If Epic decides that its next big shooter will be produced with AI-generated code and art, that approach could become a benchmark for many other studios. And when the genre is the shooter, home to a huge part of the competitive scene, it hits us directly.

What you need to know

• Epic Games has reportedly delayed an unannounced Disney shooter; the planned date was March 2027 and there is no new one.
• The game would include characters from Marvel and Star Wars, according to the cited reports.
• The team is said to be using tools such as Anthropic's Claude to generate code and art, with human developers supervising and validating the output.
• A director reportedly asked the team to stop writing code by hand and to produce the art through AI workflows.
• Jake Jones, Epic's director of communications, describes the strategy as AI-assisted development that is still led by the developers themselves.

What changes in how Epic makes games

What stands out is not that Epic uses artificial intelligence, something many studios already do for specific tasks, but the scope of the directive. According to the report, the idea is not to lean on AI to speed up certain parts, but to make it the main workflow for both programming and art. The human role shifts toward review and validation: developers would go from writing to supervising.

The company's official position, voiced by Jake Jones, insists that control remains in the team's hands. It is an important nuance in the messaging, although the source does not detail how work is actually split between people and tools in practice, nor how much of the delay is due to this shift and how much to other factors.

The Unreal Engine factor

The report also links this shift to the future of Unreal Engine. It makes sense: what Epic learns from producing a game of this scale with AI could end up carried over into the tools used by thousands of studios. If the experiment works, we will likely see that approach packaged and sold as an advantage of the engine. If it fails, the first to pay the price will be a project built on two of the most powerful licenses in entertainment.

Our take

Here in the Underworld Lordz newsroom, we are clear that AI is already part of game development, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But using it as a tool is one thing, and reorganizing an entire project around it to the point of delaying it is another. For a shooter that aims to have a competitive life, what really matters is the netcode, hitbox consistency, character balance and stable performance. These are areas where a subtle bug ruins matches and tournaments, and where human review cannot be a mere formality. If the code is generated faster but validated in a rush, it is the players who pay for it.

We are also concerned about the visual identity. A game with Marvel and Star Wars heroes lives on its personality, and the community has shown that it spots, and punishes, art that feels generic. For content creators, that is no small detail: a recognizable style is what makes a clip land, a thumbnail stand out and a game keep people talking well beyond its launch.

That said, we would rather have a delay than a broken launch. If Epic takes the time needed to make sure this way of working does not compromise quality, so much the better. What we ask for is transparency: that they explain which parts of the game were made with AI and how they ensure the result lives up to what a competitive shooter demands. And, while they are at it, that they do not forget the people who make games: supervising should not be a synonym for doing without them.

What do you think?

An Epic shooter with Marvel and Star Wars sounds like a blockbuster, but how it is made could change the perception of the whole project. Would you trust a competitive shooter developed mainly with AI, or do you think it is a gamble that puts at risk what matters most to those of us who take our gaming seriously? Drop by the team chat or our Discord and tell us where you stand.