Shadow Of The Colossus Director Promises No AI In Gen Atlas

Gen Atlas obtained a brand new trailer at Summer Game Fest 2026, reminding everybody that the director of Shadow of the Colossus is engaged on a wild new sci-fi journey for Epic Video games. Legendary developer Fumito Ueda isn’t promising when the brand new blockbuster will launch, however he’s promising his new studio making it isn’t leaning on generative AI.

“All the pieces that’s thought-about sport improvement” is “made by people,” he advised PC Gamer in a recent interview. Presumably, meaning issues like prototyping, idea artwork, and probably even the code that Gen Atlas will run on. As an alternative, the designer behind classics like Ico and The Final Guardian mentioned his new studio genDESIGN, which is making the sport underneath a publishing settlement with Epic Video games, solely makes use of genAI for administrative help. That features “arising with schedules” and “summarizing assembly notes,” however not, for instance, creating placeholder belongings for the sport.

That seemingly distinguishes Gen Atlas from video games like Crazy Taxi and Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, each of which arrived on Steam with genAI disclosures on their retailer listings. “We used it as a reference,” collection creator Kenji Kanno told Kotaku through a translator. “So our artists would pull up [and] generate a few of their concepts after which they’d have a look at that, you understand, generated picture after which they’d draw the precise factor. So precise creators, all the things from programming to belongings, all the things is made by an precise human. It’s solely used as a reference for them to have a look at after which they’d truly create the precise factor that might go into the sport.”

Loopy Taxi is one instance of a reboot whose flirtation with genAI has killed some followers’ hype for the sport, regardless of the builders clearly attempting to determine the boundary between what they assume could be useful for manufacturing versus what gamers are keen to tolerate. In Gen Atlas‘ case, it sounds just like the expertise is getting used to probably ship emails to employees however to not ideate about what the sport itself needs to be. We’ll see how lengthy it takes to search out out what the reply to that finally ends up being. Realizing Ueda’s previous historical past, it may very well be some time till Gen Atlas is prepared for prime time.