Epic delays Disney shooter past March 2027 and drops hand-written code

Epic Games delayed its first major Disney game, a shooter built around Marvel and Star Wars characters, and told the team building it to stop writing code by hand. The game had been slated for March 2027 and now has no release date, Bloomberg reported after seeing internal messages. One of the game's directors told staff there would be "no more hand-written code" and that all art would be "generated with full AI workflows."heise.de+1

The delay matters because this shooter was meant to open a multi-game partnership between Epic and Disney, which invested $1.5 billion in Epic in 2024 in exchange for an equity stake. What is new is the production model: the team is moving to an "AI first" approach, with models such as Anthropic's Claude producing code and art while people steer and correct the output. Bloomberg reported this makes Epic the first major games company to build a big-budget title with AI as the foundation of the whole production line.

What the delay changes

The work was already behind schedule before the AI directive arrived. Bloomberg reported that Epic underestimated how many employees and how much time the production would require. Heise reported the same finding, citing Bloomberg. The delay to March 2027 had been decided before the AI mission was given, according to Engadget's account of the Bloomberg report. Epic has not named a new release date internally either, Heise reported.

Epic's communications director, Jake Jones, told Bloomberg the company is embracing AI-accelerated development, led by Epic developers who are the visionaries and creative drivers behind everything the company does. Chief executive Tim Sweeney wrote on X shortly before the report appeared that Epic has "a huge pivot underway" and is "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration." Disney did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment.

The mechanism is straightforward: instead of engineers typing source code and artists drawing assets, large language models generate both, and staff review, steer and fix the output. Heise reported that AI tools such as Anthropic's Claude take on the work while humans guide and supervise it. Sweeney wrote that 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."

How the AI directive works

Developers learned of the change on a video call in early October, Bloomberg reported, and some were stunned. Some staff joked about asking Claude to fix its own mistakes, while others hoped the instruction was not serious or would be withdrawn, Heise reported. Several doubted the plan would work. One open question was who catches and fixes mistakes when both the code and the art come out of a model.

Layoffs predate the AI pivot

Epic's financial pressure is real. The company cut more than 1,000 jobs in March, blaming a downturn in Fortnite engagement, Heise and. Sweeney told staff then that the layoffs had nothing to do with AI, and that if AI raises productivity, Epic wants to employ as many good developers as possible. When a user on X asked how the AI pivot squared with those layoffs, Sweeney did not reply.

Because Epic also makes Unreal Engine, the toolset many other studios use, the experiment reaches beyond one shooter. Sweeney 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. Players have already criticised AI-generated content as lower quality, and an AI-voiced Darth Vader added to Fortnite in 2025 repeated curse words until Epic pushed a hotfix.

What happens next

The next step is a release date Epic has not set. The game had been planned for March 2027, and Heise reported Epic has not named a new date internally. Epic also has not said what the delay means for the size of the team still working on the project.