Capcom RE Engine AI Plans

Resident Evil and Street Fighter developer Capcom has clarified its stance on artificial intelligence and its future plans for the RE Engine.

Capcom held its yearly recruitment conference on October 2, wherein programmer Satoshi Ishida outlined the company’s plans to incrementally improve its RE Engine using a program called REX, short for RE Next Engine.

Rather than building a new engine from scratch, Ishida explained that a series of steps will be taken to improve the RE Engine piece by piece. This includes the use of artificial intelligence, which gave fans pause after details emerged online.

Addressing Development Challenges

Capcom outlined the challenges its developers are currently facing that led the company to rethink how it makes games with the RE Engine. Representatives confirmed that games are becoming increasingly colossal undertakings, requiring immense amounts of time and resources. With artificial intelligence advancing rapidly, Capcom identified an opportunity to use it to resolve these issues, making developers more efficient by improving development tools, testing game code, and analyzing large datasets.

Capcom’s vision for REX is to implement these efficiency tools into the next iteration of the RE Engine to help the company build games faster with advanced tools. The company emphasized that it has no plans to use generative artificial intelligence, which creates content based on a prompt, in the creation of its games. Any artificial intelligence used with the RE Engine will serve exclusively to streamline processes and support development teams.

Asset Generation Stance

This distinction means that artificial intelligence will not be used for generating game assets or programs. Capcom previously addressed this topic during a March shareholders’ meeting regarding its intended applications for artificial intelligence.

Capcom stated at the time that it will not implement assets generated by artificial intelligence into its games. However, the publisher plans to proactively use the technology to improve efficiency and productivity across graphics, sound, and programming departments.

Upcoming software releases from the publisher include Resident Evil Veronica and Mega Man: Dual Override.