Yesterday’s State of Unreal presentation by Epic Games was full of announcements, including news of an upcoming Fortnite collaboration with Vampire Survivors.
But something else that Epic showed off yesterday was its loud support of generative AI in game development. And that may have potentially caused a problem when it comes to Vampire Survivors dev, poncle.
Accompanying the show, Epic put out a lengthy blog post yesterday titled “The Road to Unreal Engine 6,” that was basically a few hundred words hyping up how great generative AI tools are when it comes to game dev, and how easy it makes using UE6.
“On the topic of [gen-AI] model-assisted creation, we see it helping tighten iteration loops and reducing time-consuming manual setup of levels, character rigs, particle systems, skinning bone weights, as well as adjusting lighting, etc: all the manual work required to translate professional creative intent into interactive, performant, and cross-platform games,” Epic said in the blog post. “Crucially, Unreal Engine is uniquely placed to be the efficient, cross-platform, high-fidelity runtime that will remain the substrate on which much of the world’s best games run.”
“Following today’s news about gen AI usage by Epic to create all sort of game assets, including Fortnite characters, we’re currently ‘reviewing’ our collaboration with Fortnite,” poncle said in a comment on the Vampire Survivors Reddit page. “We’ll let you know if anything moves forward.”
Epic said that it sees “LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex playing a central role in helping you build content faster while maintaining the creative control you need.”
Unreal Engine 5 has become commonplace in game development over the past several years, and UE6 will likely follow suit for many developers. But with such an openly positive stance on gen-AI, it’s cause for concern, at least when it comes to poncle. I’d imagine other studios may feel similarly.
The post Vampire Survivors dev may nix Fortnite collab in light of Epic’s ‘central role’ stance on AI in game dev appeared first on Destructoid.
