On October 2, Capcom held an open conference event for engineers and the games industry where it divulged information on the direction it wishes to take the RE Engine moving forward, including specifying where it wishes to use AI and where it wishes to avoid its use as the industry increasingly embraces the technology.
Over the last decade, Capcom has utilized its internally developed RE Engine on almost all of its projects, with the tools being optimized to allow for shared development knowledge across all teams at the company and to support the scaling of projects more easily to hardware of varying power, from PC to Nintendo Switch. Many say the technology is a key aspect of the company’s recent change in fortunes. At the conference, representatives from Capcom sought to discuss where the technology will continue to evolve, while sharing lessons they’ve learned from its development.
According to a report on the talk from GameBiz, the continued evolution and improvement of the RE Engine forms part of the REX Initiative (standing for RE neXt engine), first discussed by the company in 2023. These efforts are centered on five goals, including reducing complex code into simpler rules that the engine can process more quickly (RE:Dox) and generating more efficient and easier-to-modify internal reports for catching and amending errors in coding or compilation (RE:Log), among others. These all concern the kind of behind-the-scenes technology that most players will never need to worry about, but they’re designed to assist the engine’s ability to perform well on a range of different hardware.
The company, however, has insisted that part of the gradual improvement and evolution of the RE Engine is in service of developing an “engine for the AI generation” that will allow the company to “develop games together with AI.” Earlier this year, Capcom publicly assured audiences that its games would not include AI-generated assets and that its flirtations with AI were instead focused on improving efficiency during the development process.
As part of this evolving RE Engine, Capcom has chosen to release the RE:Dox and RE:Log tools as open-source tools on programming website Github. According to the company, by making these tools available online, it’s enabling AI programs to learn about the way they function. The hope is that, if AI can understand the tools, it will be able to look at human-developed code made internally at Capcom and assist in creating internal playtests of levels, searching for and fixing bugs.
According to one slide in the company’s presentation, these new AI agents will be able to play builds, log issues, analyze data, and detect visual and gameplay bugs and issues with memory or performance, then suggest a fix that a human developer would manually implement.
This is something a number of companies have been experimenting with for a number of years, even before generative AI was a major point of discussion for many studios. Notably, Sony previously discussed a similar concept a similar concept at Japanese developer conference CEDEC in 2024.
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まとめ(ΦωΦ)
他は話が早くて写真で精一杯(ΦωΦ) pic.twitter.com/E1ErtUa6eW— IZUN∀🦊UnrealFox【ANMs】 (@mizuki_izuna) October 2, 2026
And Capcom insists that this is the extent to which it seeks to implement AI in the process of game development. By using AI to limit the amount of repetitive work that human beings have to do, the hope is that those human developers can focus on the creative aspects of development. “AI is not a replacement for humans,” the company insisted during the conference.