Epic Games could be developing a shooter with Walt Disney Co. based on the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, and while this may seem like great news, it comes with a big caveat. Although the company behind Fortnite has plenty of experience in both fields, shooters and mixing concepts that don’t seem to go together, it seems the game is going to be delayed, with no date, after it was due to be released in March of this year and was delayed. The reason? They want to introduce a production model they have called “AI first.”
A game with many caveats
According to Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, this initiative would be based on reducing development time by having tools like Claude take care of the bulk of production, while human beings would merely be in charge of supervising and polishing the results. In the words of one of the game’s directors, “there will be no more code written by hand” and, in addition, the game’s art will be “generated through workflows based entirely on AI”. Something that has been confirmed to Bloomberg News by Jake Jones, communications director at Epic News, who said “we are adopting AI-accelerated development, led by Epic’s developers, who are the visionaries and the creative engine of everything we do”.
All this raises a lot of questions about the approach. To begin with, there is strong opposition to the use of AI in video games that doesn’t seem likely to disappear anytime soon. If it ever does. But on top of that, the notion that it will save them development time doesn’t seem backed by any empirical evidence. Quite the opposite. A recent study from Harvard University shows that using AI for programming doesn’t improve productivity, but rather, at best, ends up producing the same results as not using it.
With plans for Fortnite to also become an AI-first platform, it seems Epic Games has decided to see this through. So it seems this won’t be the last we hear of this approach to video games. Whether it’s positive or negative for their development.
