Capcom has announced its plans to overhaul the studio’s in-house gaming engine, the RE Engine, with a multi-step improvement project titled REX that will see the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to streamline development processes.
As outlined by Japanese news outlet gamebiz (via VGC), the REX project, short for RE neXt Engine, was announced during the Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026 on 2 October, and will see the studio adding gradual improvements to the existing RE Engine rather than creating a brand-new one from scratch.
As part of a presentation titled “The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for the Next Generation”, Capcom programmer Satoshi Ishida noted that the studio is currently facing three issues surrounding game development – the fact that games are becoming so massive that even small processes during development are now extremely time-consuming, the increased number of staff on the team requiring an engine that’s easy to use for everyone, and AI integration becoming essential for streamlining development.
REX is set to address these issues by making game development more efficient, using AI integration to streamline processes like generating code, running automated playtests for bug fixing, and supporting a developer’s work behind the scenes, with Capcom already open-sourced some of the underlying technology to help with AI training.
With this, Capcom’s goal is to build a future where the studio can “create games together with AI”, and it seems to be using AI integration to speed up and make development easier rather than generate assets, a sentiment previously shared by the studio during an investor Q&A, where it stressed that while AI will be used to improve efficiency, the “creativity at the core of such experiences should be handled by humans.”
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Si Jia
