Saber walls its big projects off from neural networks: there will be no generative AI in Space Marine 3

Saber Interactive has drawn a line inside its own production: experiments with generative neural networks stay within one project, while the major licensed games are made without them. The studio's creative director, Tim Willits, listed where generative AI is absent: “No generative AI in Space Marine 3, Hellraiser, Stuntman, Turok, Jurassic Park or Wick.”

The statement diverges from management's public position. Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch openly advocates the use of AI in development and has said he is ready to “have a reasonable conversation about how AI can and should shape player experiences.” Willits describes the situation differently: neural networks are being used in one test case, not across the entire studio.

The experiment has been locked inside a single game

The occasion for the conversation was the scandal around Rideshare Simulator. The project's lead writer, Stella Sacco, said she had been replaced by AI. Karch called that a PR stunt and reported that Sacco had been taken off the project three years earlier. The community was left unhappy and began to discuss whether the studio's AI course would also affect Space Marine 3.

Willits explained the logic in an interview with IGN: Rideshare is the only project where the studio is trying out the technology, and the team considered exactly this type of game suitable for the experiment. “We'll try it in Rideshare, we'll see whether it works. We'll see whether people like it. If they don't — well, fine,” he said. In his words, developers have not yet worked out how to get value out of generative AI, and Saber is no exception here; the players themselves do not understand what to do with it either. Willits allows that sooner or later someone will release a game that changes the general opinion, and then the arguments will die down.

For developers this is a description of a working model: the technology is tested on a single title, and the decision about its further fate is tied to the audience's reaction.

At Games Workshop the ban is written into the rules

With Space Marine 3 the situation is different for two reasons. The first is the audience: after the success of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, no less is expected of the sequel, and the Warhammer 40,000 fanbase has been built up over years. The second is that the owner of the universe, Games Workshop Group PLC, maintains a strict internal policy against generative AI, and it extends both to the products themselves and to their advertising.

In other words, the terms are set not by the studio alone. The rights holder's rules apply regardless of what the developer's management thinks about neural networks. For artists, writers and outsourcing teams this is a tangible detail: working on a licensed project in such a universe means a ban on generative tools imposed by the owner of the rights.

Space Marine 3, meanwhile, remains in development, and no release date has been announced. The game was announced in March 2025, with promises of a campaign, multiplayer and large-scale battles.

The pipeline is splitting into two tracks

The story looks like part of a broader process: development is settling into a split between projects where generative tools are tried openly and projects where they are ruled out by the rights holder's requirements or by reputational risk. Against the backdrop of such cases, the argument about AI shifts from the company level to the level of the individual title, and the answer depends on whose intellectual property it is and how visible its audience is.

The rights holders of major universes will probably formalise their rules ever more strictly, while contractor studios will have to run two production tracks with different requirements for tools and for reporting the provenance of content. If the trend continues, specialists will have an additional question when choosing a project — are generative tools allowed on it, and is it necessary to document that the assets and texts were made by people.

For now the signal from Saber is a concrete one: the studio is not carrying its management's AI agenda over to its main releases and is leaving the experiment to one game, whose fate it is ready to reconsider based on the reaction of players.

Why is Saber keeping generative AI away from Space Marine 3: licensors' requirements, the risk of a scandal with fans, the weak quality of the results?