This past weekend, Capcom held its own technology conference fittingly dubbed the “Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026.” A showcase for new technological advancements coming to its in-house game engine, programmer Satoshi Ishida revealed something of a bombshell at the conference for where the RE Engine will be going soon. Noted as being part of what Capcom is calling the “REX Project,” Ishida said the company’s goal is to “create games together with AI,” which involves tuning RE engine towards becoming an “AI-generation game engine.”

What Is the REX Project?

In a report from Japanese publication Gamebiz, Ishida’s presentation on the evolution of the RE Engine is detailed in its entirety. As you could likely surmise from the abbreviation, REX is simply an evolution of the current RE engine (which is an abbreviation of “Reach for the Moon“). The REX Project, therefore, is an outline of steps Capcom is taking to evolve its in-house technology for next-generation development. While not far removed from the RE engine, the next iteration of it will likely be called the REX engine.

Where Does AI Fit In?

As mentioned above, Ishida states the goal for Capcom is to “create games together with AI.” This came about from key areas Capcom believed was slowing development down for major AAA games. One is that games have grown so large in scope that iteration times on ideas are slowing development down. Another was that with the growing size of Capcom, teaching new hires everything about the RE engine is becoming complex, thus wasting time. The company also feels that attempting to staple AI into the existing framework isn’t feasible, so would rather development a new version of the engine around AI to better accommodate developers.

The desired outcome is for REX is to be written in an easily understandable coding language that AI can interpret and iterate on. As Ishida said, “This offers a significant advantage, not only in terms of ease of use for human developers but also in terms of readability and comprehension for AI. With a unified base language, in the future, AI will be able to understand and automatically create programs, and even perform test plays to automatically check for bugs.”

How Will This Benefit Other Developers?

While speaking for Capcom specifically at the moment, Ishida mentions that the company hopes to make its advancements done with REX open-source for other developers to use. This will allow other programmers to tinker with REX and train the AI further, potentially improving its quality. The first of these technologies available will be RE:Dox and RE:Log. RE:Dox is a system that can translate data from any format into a common set of rules at high speeds. RE:Log, meanwhile, is a way of streamlining operation logs so that teams can better collect bug reports and the like.

Last Word on RE Engine Evolving With AI

Personally, I do not like this trend of developers and publishers incorporating AI in ways that make no sense. To many outside the tech industry, programming seems like the “obvious” area where AI can help, but it often bloats code and confuses itself with discrepancies that wind up costing time and money. Building a game engine around fixing those issues could result in better tools, but it’s also likely to wind up backfiring or hurting development speeds further. I think it would be wiser for Capcom to stick with traditional coding methods so that humans can better understand where issues arise.

As far as if this means AI generated content will make its way into games, I don’t think that is likely. In an investor Q&A for its FY26 financial results, Capcom noted that it wanted to make use of gen AI to “improve the efficiency of routine operations,” but specifically that, “the creativity at the core of such experiences should be handled by humans.” Any AI usage at all is not good, but I suppose until the AI bubble bursts, these companies are going to keep exploring ways to utilize it.