Gen Atlas acquired a brand new trailer at Summer season Recreation 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.
“The whole lot that’s thought-about sport improvement” is “made by people,” he instructed PC Gamer in a current interview. Presumably, which means issues like prototyping, idea artwork, and doubtlessly 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 below 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 property for the sport.
That seemingly distinguishes Gen Atlas from video games like Loopy 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,” sequence creator Kenji Kanno instructed Kotaku by way of 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 recognize, generated picture after which they’d draw the precise factor. So precise creators, every part from programming to property, every part is made by an precise human. It’s solely used as a reference for them to take a look at after which they’d really create the precise factor that will 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 suppose is likely to be useful for manufacturing versus what gamers are prepared to tolerate. In Gen Atlas‘ case, it sounds just like the expertise is getting used to doubtlessly ship emails to workers however to not ideate about what the sport itself needs to be. We’ll see how lengthy it takes to seek out out what the reply to that finally ends up being. Figuring out Ueda’s previous historical past, it might be some time till Gen Atlas is prepared for prime time.
