Epic Games delays Disney-character shooter and moves its team to Claude

Epic Games is delaying its shooter featuring Disney characters and moving its developers to Claude. The project, confirmed in February 2024, will not ship any time soon and will be built mostly with generative AI. The report gives no new release date. Almost three years have passed since the announcement and there is still no game, and the studio now explains the delay by a change in how the game is made.

What we know about the delay

The source describes the situation briefly. The Fortnite team at Epic Games is working on the project, with Disney as a partner. The game is being delayed while the development process is rebuilt around generative models. The working tool is named as Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. The phrase "No more handwritten code" appears in the 3DNews headline. From the available text, it is unclear whether this is a quote from Epic's leadership or the outlet's paraphrase, so it cannot be attributed to any specific person.

Much else is also unknown: the shooter's genre details, the list of Disney characters, the platforms, and how much code and how many assets are handed to the model. It is unclear whether the shift covers only programming or content as well. The headline refers specifically to code.

The facts as they stand:

• Studio: Epic Games, Fortnite team
• Partner: Disney
• Announcement: February 2024
• Status: delayed, no release window given
• AI tool: Claude (Anthropic)
• Share of generative AI: "most of it", no exact figures

Why the pause looks reasonable

Switching to new tooling in the middle of production usually costs time. The team has to rebuild its pipeline, agree on review rules, and decide who is responsible for code that a human did not write. If Epic has announced such a turnaround, it is logical to treat the release delay as the price of that overhaul. This is an assumption; the text does not confirm it.

The move does not look accidental for Epic. The studio makes Unreal Engine and runs Fortnite as a service with constant updates. Iteration speed and content volume matter to it, and AI coding hits exactly those metrics. A game with Disney characters also demands very strict compliance with licensing terms. Here a model has more room to make mistakes than when generating typical game code.

Risks that remain off-screen

The main question is quality. A shooter lives on responsiveness, netcode and balance, and players feel errors in these within minutes. Generated code has to be read, tested and maintained for years, not just run once. If part of the team shifts from writing code to checking it, the load on reviewers will grow.

Another issue concerns rights and reputation. Disney keeps a close watch on how its characters are used. The use of generative AI in a project with its heroes is unlikely to have gone unnoticed by the lawyers at both companies. How responsibility and control over generated material are divided does not follow from the available data.

Finally, players and industry developers have long argued about AI in games. A bold statement about abandoning handwritten code, coming from one of the biggest studios, will fuel that debate.

What studios and developers should do

Until Epic has numbers, it is too early to draw firm conclusions. But the practical steps for other teams are already clear:

• Define which parts of the codebase can be handed to AI and which stay under manual control: networking, anti-cheat, payment flows.
• Build review time into the plan. Gains in writing speed are often eaten up by verification.
• Decide up front how to store the history of prompts and edits, so you can explain the origin of any piece of code.
• If the project involves someone else's franchise, agree with the rights holder on what exactly may be generated.
• Watch for Epic's next announcement: the release date and the quality of the first build will show whether the pause paid off.