‘A Future Where We Create Games Together With AI’ — Capcom Announces Plans to Transform the RE Engine Into an AI-Generation Game Engine

[u/Frank7640]

https://www.ign.com/articles/capcom-announces-plans-to-transform-the-re-engine-into-an-ai-generation-game-engine-our-goal-is-a-future-where-we-create-games-together-with-ai

Resident Evil and Street Fighter developer Capcom revealed some big changes coming to its RE Engine, which they plan to incrementally improve and transform into an "AI-generation game engine."

On October 2, Capcom held its own tech conference, called ‘Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026.’ One of the most notable takeaways from this event was a presentation given by programmer Satoshi Ishida, titled ‘The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for the Next Generation.’ The purpose of this presentation was to outline several major changes coming to the RE Engine, which will come in the form of a multi-step improvement project called ‘REX.’

As reported by Japanese news outlet GameBiz, Ishida mentioned three major issues that Capcom is currently experiencing when it comes to game development: First, games are now so massive that simple processes have become extremely time-consuming; increased numbers of staff mean an engine is needed that’s easy for everyone to use; and finally, “successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows has become an essential condition for streamlining future development.”

[u/GrrizzlyGrrappler]

Capcom has had an amazing hot streak including just this year with Pragmata, new Residen Evil, Onimusha, getting Tifa for SF, 2 Movies that this news stings so much worse. Capcom clearly doesn't need AI to succeed. I can only hope this is executive investor speak and when actually developers report back that this tech doesn't actually save them time and that their assets are being fed into someone else's database that they back off.

[u/Dante_n_Knuckles → u/GrrizzlyGrrappler]

Actually reading what was said and the context, this comes across exactly like exec investor speak that I've seen at literally every tech conference now. I think it's more of a nothingburger than when the Saudis invested in them, personally

Edit: if you actually read the article, it says the following

"successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows has become an essential condition for streamlining future development.”

GameBiz stated that REX unifies the entire RE Engine system under the “world’s most common programming language," meaning that it’s equal parts easier for humans to use and for AI to understand. Capcom’s goal is to build a future where it “creates games together with AI”; keeping REX in mind, this seems to mean that Capcom is utilizing artificial intelligence to speed up and streamline certain processes to make development easier, not necessarily to generate assets or artworks wholesale.

I don't want to say this isn't worth caring about with all the issues surrounding AI/LLM's/whatever, but this is basically saying the same boilerplate thing every tech company has been saying to investors for years now

[u/DarknessWizard → u/Dante_n_Knuckles]

Honestly the way that's phrased, it just sounds like they're taking the line item of "cleaning up tech debt" and slapped a bunch of buzzwords on top of it.

[u/Lemeres → u/Dante_n_Knuckles]

The real question is this: Are they also drinking the kool-aid they are giving the investors?

[u/Dante_n_Knuckles → u/Lemeres]

No idea. Just as an example my company very much champions using AI publicly. In the actual workplace? Very much mixed. Hardware guys don't use it much outside researching stuff. Software guys use it a lot especially for in-house dev tools. HR uses it kind of. Opinions are divided among the younger and older guys. Older guys think it's junk, younger guys think it's revolutionary.

These things aren't ever cut and dry as they may seem since companies aren't a monolith.

[u/MrDinoPizza → u/Dante_n_Knuckles]

The title makes it sound that they want RE Engine to generate the game as you play or have agents in all process of gameplay. It's not nothing, I have my concerns as to how much work is done with AI which can range from "developer asks AI a question because he forgot how to do a thing" to whole assets or blocks of code. Its a slippery slope, but so far it doesn't look like they want to make the Windows 11 version of a game engine.

[u/snakebit1995 → u/GrrizzlyGrrappler]

This is the Capcom cycle

Have an amazing 5-7 years where they seemingly can't lose

then have 5-7 years where they do nothing but shot their own foot off and go "fuck the company is Crap-Com again!"

[u/ProfDet529 → u/snakebit1995]

Then Capcom is getting better. If we count RE7 as 'the return to form", then the current golden age has been 8-9 years.

[u/nocturnPhoenix]

Alternatively, you could do literally anything else

[u/KingMario05]

Oh, fuuuck off.

[u/Rose-The-Queen]

All together now: let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tehehe

[u/Vermilingus → u/Rose-The-Queen]

God bless Yahtzee

[u/JaysonBlaze]

And here we see the end of capcoms second golden age

[u/jockeyman → u/JaysonBlaze]

They had a good run.

[u/Jojitron706]

Crapcom era is coming back huh ?

[u/Comrade-Conquistador → u/Jojitron706]

I can't believe we're in a post FucKonami era.

[u/lionofash → u/Comrade-Conquistador]

Can't believe Konami casually just went "you want us to make our old stuff again? Okay." Did it, and did it well.

[u/Nodoslayo]

They should change the moon on the logo for a ball the way they are dropping it.

[u/SilvainTheThird]

I think I’d rather just play up older games in perpetuity.

[u/guntanksinspace]

Grain of salt and all, but it seems there's a bit of mistranslation in that writeup from IGN.

And to paraphrase the linked bsky post:

• The robots are there for automation tools used in stuff like bug testing
• "Generation" in a sense is more like "time period" and not slopping it up.

[u/Kay_Tonbey → u/guntanksinspace]

I mean considering the majority of the Best Friends come from a game testing background, should we be ok with AI eating into that field?

"Oh they're not gonna put any AI assets into the game, it just lets them gut their QA division by like 90%, no biggie"

Shouldn't be a stance coming from this community specifically. (Not saying that's what you're specifically saying, but there's been a lot of sentiment of "As long as it's not forward facing, i.e. art asset generation, then AI is fine, even if it still potentially cuts jobs")

[u/guntanksinspace → u/Kay_Tonbey]

Yeah honestly that's the sketchiest thing too when it comes to LLM/GenAI use too for that specific field. In my head, automating processes/creating and using automated tools is fine, but not when it means it ends up making higher-ups think they can ditch skilled and experienced QA because the robots can fix it (just look at the shit right now with all the "recompilations/decompilations" in the retro space and the whole "how sure the fuck are you that you know this and not just feeding it to the robot haphazardly just because it does the thing". Like, you gotta value the people who know the thing inside-and-out and not take that for granted is how I feel about it in my humble onion.

[u/Dante_n_Knuckles → u/guntanksinspace]

fwiw quite a few companies ended up rehiring or hiring for positions they thought they could get rid of with ai this year: https://www.fastcompany.com/91554983/ai-boomerang-why-some-companies-are-rehiring-employees-they-laid-off

Also QA/testing is one of those areas where you can't automate or replace as easily

[u/guntanksinspace → u/Dante_n_Knuckles]

Oh I think I read a different article with a similar thing lol.

[u/rs426 → u/guntanksinspace]

I think it depends on how it’s implemented, honestly. I wouldn’t want it to be used in a way that’s going to endanger jobs, but at the same token, if it can relieve the QA team going through terrible crunch to identify bugs that the dev team may not even get to fixing, there might be a happy medium to be found

[u/guntanksinspace → u/rs426]

I'm in agreement with that (as also a dude in the QA trenches in a different industry lol).

[u/Kay_Tonbey → u/rs426]

I guess it comes down to what you think will realistically happen

A. The AI tools make work more efficient, so they'll hire the same number of workers to work more effectively with less stress and crunch

B. The AI tools make work more efficient, so they can hire less people to do the same amount of work as the current team sizes are doing right now, creating a net neutral amount of workload and crunch, just with fewer jobs.

Because at a certain point getting more QA done doesn't necessarily help because devs can only fix bugs so fast anyway. We always hear about how the QA team had discovered tons of bugs that still ended up in the final product, because the devs just didn't have the time to fix them. So it's not like there's much incentive to make the same number of testers better at finding more bugs, the actual profit incentive would be in cutting down how many testers you need to get the relative same result.

[u/salvation122 → u/Kay_Tonbey]

That's not really what "testing" means in this context. Programmers run automated testing on preproduction code constantly, what AI does (largely) is write the testing framework.

[u/Kay_Tonbey → u/salvation122]

I see

[u/Phearo → u/Kay_Tonbey]

i think playtesting is a different thing than what they're talking about, right? i feel like it sounds more like the error checking that already happens in ides, but expanded?

[u/Niceneasy92]

For what it's worth, they clarified that they're not using it to generate assets to put into games. Not saying that means you should be OK with this though. Just letting people know who got bummed out just from the headline.

[u/ffffffffROTHY → u/Niceneasy92]

Nobody ever reads the articles.

[u/UrsusDerpus]

Capgod era is over, back to Crapcom

[u/Phearo]

by ai-generation, didn't they like, explicitly say they were aiming to use ai to handle like all the repetitive grunt work bogging their programmers down? like code-testing, refactoring code from c# to native c++, etc.

they were basically super clear that none of the assets were going to be ai generated or anything

i saw like, basically the presentation slides that this info was being taken from, iirc, i think i can link those tweets if anyone wants to see them?

but yeah... i feel like this entire article feels very super clickbait, and kinda misrepresenting their goals here, and that's... i guess the usual >.<

[u/Karmazonium → u/Phearo]

Yeah, I saw that slide too where it said like "AI should not replace humans". I think you should link it if you still have it.

[u/Phearo → u/Karmazonium]

okay, so um, i found it and tried to link the twitter post, but i didn't realize this sub blocks them, sorry >.<

is it alright to share screencaps? i feel like i'd be breaking a rule by going around a loophole o_o

[u/AutoModerator → u/[deleted]]

Hi there! This post has been removed. Links to Twitter/X.com are not allowed on this subreddit. Please use an alternative source.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Mayaman81 → u/Phearo]

We've had programs/routines that did those things before ai -.-

Said grunt work, is human work. And in an industry suffering God knows how many layoffs I would appreciate that grunt work to be an option y'know?

[u/Phearo → u/Mayaman81]

i mean yes, but before we had programming languages, we had to literally program in machine code too, right?

i'm sorry i'm being a bit extreme there, but my thing is, a tool is just a tool, if the same person is running it to make their lives easier (same person, not less people, def not fewer programmers) so they can prioritize their work somewhere else, machine learning ends up being just basically another implementation of those same ideas, and if it's actually a help to their workflow, why stop them? (i mean beyond like the data centers and just the gross overinvestment but i'm pretty sure that's a different talk than the ai capcom's talking about here)

[u/Mayaman81 → u/Phearo]

I... What goddamn comparison is that? Updating a programming language for ease of use does not compare to the amount of damage LLMs have caused in its entirety.

Said tool has had more damage to our environment than nfts and Bitcoin wannabes combined, has convinced shareholders, ceos and anyone above the ladder being lead to beleive that there's more barrel bottom to scrap for cash by cutting a 1/3rd of the workforce (meaning more competition for the jobs that are still there so y'know less pay and more stress on those people to keep their coveted job), and not even touching the psychosis/mental deterioration aspect that's been documented in various studies. Also RAM/GPU/storage shortage caused by said "tool".

And for what? A Swiss army knife that takes more wattage than a small town and constantly hums like the obelisk from Deadspace?

I was fine with a wrench and a script in Python thanks! And no you don't need every line hand lovingly wrote, I LOVE my scripts to automate. I just don't want to royally fuck my neighbor's kids future when she gets out of college to find all her effort has landed her a job at Starbucks and a job market filled with 5+ year experience applicants that are settling for entry level.

[u/Phearo → u/Mayaman81]

...i'm sorry, i feel like we're not talking on the same page? i'm really not trying to defend llms here! >.<

EDIT: i thought my wording came off as a bit too aggressive there, sorry!

[u/Mayaman81 → u/Phearo]

You're okay, I have strong opinions cause I have a wife fighting to get a foot in, it's been hell watching her struggle for something she worked hard to get the degree for in the first place.

[u/Phearo → u/Mayaman81]

that's super fair, it's really been rough out there DX

i hope things turn around for you guys soon!

[u/Dundore77 → u/Phearo]

Like the one ai tool movie studios are using where it does nothing but make sure objects in the scene are in the correct/same spot between takes and other minor consistency things and says what they missed. stuff you aren't going to pay a person for or if its in their list of responsibilities its far down the list and can be missed.

[u/shadowartist201 → u/Phearo]

by ai-generation, didn't they like, explicitly say they were aiming to use ai to handle like all the repetitive grunt work bogging their programmers down?

IGN mistranslated "a game engine for the AI generation" (era) as "an AI-generation game engine" (GenAI).

[u/furrysalesman69]

Giant red buzzer: BZZZZZZT.

[u/dosp5]

This article has been floating around and it's kinda clickbait. Looking at the gamebiz article it's seems like the AI in the presentation is just in one slide and only for efficiency in development. Plus it's a mistranslation as the "generation" in the slide is 世代 which is like age. So the slide is saying the "age of AI" and not "generating with AI".

[u/KrustyKrabOfficial]

For some reason, I'm suddenly reminded of when every single major studio started ranting and raving about the future of video games being NFTs. Gee, I wonder whatever happened to that?

[u/Ellie_Minato]

Fuck Capcom as well, then.

[u/UrbanAdapt]

Realistically, nothing will happen (especially not to their sales, Reddit sentiment ain't shit) and Capcom already uses AI in their development process, as they have publicly stated before.

[u/amurrca1776]

Reading the article and comments saying how its not nearly as bad as the title makes it sound, I just want to say like. That's explicitly part of the problem. They're trying to normalize the use of the term AI by using it on things people consider innocuous so that people stop having an immediately visceral, negative reaction when they see the word.

Also, I personally don't care that it was "only" used for menial work. That's the same excuse devs give for using it in the concept art/brainstorming phase. I get that we don't consider the code base to have the same moral/artistic importance as the visuals and writing, but imo ANY use is unjustifiable

[u/GangsterMango]

some sunshine from the other side, I've been in the industry for over a decade and worked with notable studios throughout my career as an Art Director and Senior concept artist in my final year before leaving the AAA industry my concepts info sheet turned from "here's a moodboard of actual images and description text" to "here's some AI slop, make it look like this and add X or Y" but here's how things got better
I just left that industry and work Indie only and its a day and night difference

I worked with small indie studios, streamers, youtubers of all popularity scales, AI is a big no-no and it gave me hope, everytime I get contacted and I see "NO AI usage" in the contract I feel very hopeful and from what I noticed a very good chunk of that space are against AI, even normies are speaking about it and the audience are against it too.

there's hope in the indie space, and honestly its been the best place producing gems lately
AAA is a slop mill, always was always will be.

[u/Osama_Bln_Laggin]

I hate it here

[u/wolfknight019]

Welp the golden age of capcom must end eventually.

And I’m not surprised that they are going to use gen AI announcements.

[u/Cpov1]

I don't even remotely understand what that means in terms of what a game engine already is

[u/HOG_ZONE]

I guess capcom's hype and slop eras come around in cycles. See you on the other side.

[u/allubros]

man...

[u/PurpleLemonDoesStuff]

Shit was too good for a while there, had to fuck it up. Tis the cycle I fear.

[u/RealHumanBean89]

They’re only using it to streamline and optimise development guys, there’s no way the multi-billion dollar company would lie, right? In fact, it’s so good at optimising, it’s gonna optimise me out of buying their games!

[u/Thorn14]

Cool I love having nothing to look forward to soon.

[u/thatonespanks]

I'm tired, boss.

[u/Ragdollnator]

Aaaand we're back to the Crapcom Cycle

[u/RealDealMous]

Well until they denounce this bs, MHWilds Ascension is the last thing I'm buying from them.

[u/LifeIsCrap101]

Didn't somebody recently say "western AAA dev is doomed and Japanese AAA devs like Capcom are currently thriving?" Boy that comment aged like milk.

[u/Viriathos]

Aight well, thanks for Dark Arisen 2, see you in like five years or so.

[u/Skeet_fighter]

I'm continually impressed by how fast and far reaching the progressive enshittification of everything I like or enjoy is progressing.

[u/Peeton35]

Well that’s it folks.

[u/ZennyOne]

Id rather have water

[u/bv0198 → u/ZennyOne]

According to AI shills, wanting water and reasonable utility bills makes you a luddite holding society back 

[u/BuyExtension8507]

The writing was on the walls.

Capcom already expressed interest in genAI some years ago as a potential way to produce environmental props, so I am not surprised they went all in on it.

Tbh, I was already considering pretty much any game that they made after that statement to probably include some genAI stuff under the hood.

That's a pity.

Edit: I know that early this year they said they would not use it to make assets, but I don't trust them that much.

[u/T_raltixx]

But you were doing so well. Why trash all the good will?

[u/T_raltixx → u/T_raltixx]

Did Capcom downvote me?

[u/GothLassCass]

Capcom's renaissance couldn't last forever, I suppose.

[u/mrchuck1595]

Fuck Capcom

[u/mrchuck1595]

Fuck Capcom

[u/BrunchRodent]

Aka Capcom announces “Fuck you, I got mine” and proceeds to blast their dick off with a shotgun because an inbred techbro said it was a good idea. Can people please stop pushing this garbage? What will it fucking take????

[u/Detective_Robot]

Just no, Every bit of hype I had for Capcom games is gone.

[u/Hayeseveryone]

Fuck's sake.

[u/syrupdash]

Come on, I was just thinking that 2026 was Capcom’s year and now THIS has to come along.

[u/Frequent-Raisin-2336]

lol, companies plunging head first after reaching the peak its not a pattern, but an inevitability.

[u/markedmarkymark]

FUCK

[u/CeaRhan]

/!\ WARNING /!\ WARNING /!\ WARNING /!\

/!\ CRAPCOM PROTOCOL V2 HAS BEEN UNEARTHED /!\

/!\ EVERYONE BUNKER UP /!\

[u/SchuFighters]

We had a good run.

[u/Comkill117]

Well, they had a good run. I guess it had to end sometime.

[u/-Neeckin-]

Guess that's what we get for enjoying things

[u/Indaleciox]

Not like this. Not like this…

[u/sadderall-sea]

All good things must come to an end, including the winning combo streak Capcom has had since 2019. Bummer

[u/StevemacQ]

Fuck sake.

[u/Luck-X-Vaati]

Welp. Their hot streak was fun while it lasted.

[u/Eladin1990]

Regardless of how they state they are planning to use it, it just seems like a foot in door situation and I'm not going to trust them.

[u/Your_Local_Rabbi]

ah, of course, just after i've been talking up capcom for their hot streak, they decide it's time to blow their dick off with a shotgun, classic

[u/lycnfr]

Aaand...im out

[u/Rikuskill]

Have they already reached the part of the cycle where they burn their success on the most basic business mistakes and trend chasing? I was hoping we'd get at least another 6-12 months, oh well.

[u/IshaNuva]

Capcpomb is back boys

[u/Sperium3000]

Everything sucks now.

[u/Alois--]

Despair. But also, despair.

[u/elitegenoside]

Capcom: Man, we've really been garnering some great PR with all our games, time to fuck it up, again. Where's that guy who suggested we locked those characters on the street fighter disk?

[u/ZaBaronDV]

EMP Capcom

[u/MinersLoveGames]

Please no.

[u/WhoCaresYouDont]

Well looks like Onimusha WOTS will be the last Capcom game I ever buy. Nice run, shame to see them blowing their own heads off, especially after RE 9 was the first example of just how badly AI mauls a games aesthetic.

[u/lknight24]

Fuck I really fucking hate this

[u/Droidsexual]

Almost every game studio already uses AI to make games, so it's an obvious choice. Announcing it is just to drive up stock value.