On Friday in Tokyo, Capcom programmer Satoshi Ishida put a phrase on a screen that was never going to stay inside a programming conference: ‘AI-generation game engine’.
He was talking about REX, the next stage of the RE Engine that powers ‘Resident Evil’, ‘Monster Hunter’ and most of modern Capcom. By Sunday, the phrase had escaped into English-language headlines, where it acquired the usual implication that somebody at Capcom had finally decided Leon Kennedy could be replaced by autocomplete.
That is not what Ishida described. REX is being built so AI systems can understand parts of Capcom’s codebase, help generate code and run automated tests. Around 2,000 developers already use RE Engine, and that scale has created the sort of problems nobody thinks about while watching a trailer: tools get slower, projects become harder to change, and an innocent adjustment in one place can break something several rooms away.
Capcom wants AI involved in that machinery. The company is also unusually well placed to make the case, because it is not currently staggering around looking for a miracle. ‘Resident Evil’ is working. ‘Monster Hunter’ is working. Capcom has spent most of the last decade becoming the publisher other publishers accidentally compliment while explaining why their own release calendar needs restructuring.
So when Capcom says modern games have become difficult enough to build that its engine needs changing, it is worth looking past the letters A and I. Most of what it showed would make a terrible trailer.
One part of REX is called RE:Flows. A designer has an idea for how an enemy, object or mechanic should behave, but getting far enough to discover whether the idea is any good can require somebody with the right programming knowledge first. RE:Flows lets designers build behaviour visually while translating the result into conventional code underneath.
That could shorten the distance between ‘what if this happened?’ and watching it happen, which is a useful distance to shorten when dozens of people are waiting on each other.
Other parts of REX deal with data, logging and keeping Capcom’s internal tools usable as projects grow. RE:Runtime is meant to handle large numbers of objects more efficiently. RE:Log collects information when something breaks, which in a modern game is less an exceptional event than a form of weather. Capcom has also been developing automated systems that can play builds, watch what happens and flag failures.
An AI spending six hours trying to open a door that should open is one of the stronger arguments for automation I have encountered.
This is also where ‘Capcom embraces AI’ becomes a poor description of the story. The image people understandably have in their heads is generative AI producing the things that end up in the game: artwork, dialogue, voices, textures. Capcom has previously said it does not intend to put AI-generated assets into its games. It does want generative AI inside development, where it thinks the technology can save time.
Those uses carry different consequences. An image generator replacing concept work raises questions about artists, training data and what actually reaches the screen. A system that checks whether Leon falls through the floor after somebody changes a staircase creates another set of problems, most of them harder to fit into a thumbnail.
Games have always contained enormous amounts of labour whose successful outcome is that nobody notices it happened. Nobody finishes ‘Resident Evil Requiem’ and writes a Reddit post praising the error logs. The collector’s edition does not come with a small statue commemorating improved object management.
Capcom still needs all of it to work, and REX is an attempt to make some of that invisible work faster and easier to automate. That sounds fairly sensible until the word ‘efficiency’ enters the room carrying a spreadsheet.
At Gamescom, I spoke to Tommy Thompson of AI and Games about companies celebrating productivity gains as though ‘25 per cent faster’ were a complete account of what had happened. It rarely is. A process can become faster while the person doing it ends up with more work, less control or a disappearing chair.
Capcom’s plans sit directly inside that tension. If RE:Flows means a designer can prototype something today instead of waiting until Thursday for programming support, that sounds useful. If automated testing means somebody no longer spends a night reproducing the same inventory bug 150 times, I am not going to campaign for the preservation of that particular evening.
Companies do not buy productivity software solely because employees deserve nicer Tuesdays, though. Once one developer can do work that previously required two, the second developer becomes visible to finance in an entirely new way. The software can remove tedious work or remove the person attached to it, and no feature list tells you which one management will choose.
That is what makes Capcom more interesting than another demo of a model generating a vaguely medieval village. RE Engine already works. It has shipped ‘Resident Evil’, ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Monster Hunter’ and the pleasingly strange ‘Kunitsu-Gami’. Capcom is rebuilding a successful development pipeline because games keep getting harder to make, not because the old one has caught fire.
If REX works, players may never see the parts that matter most. A designer builds a behaviour in RE:Flows, the engine turns some of it into code and an automated tester spends the night getting trapped behind a filing cabinet until it files a useful report.
By breakfast, Capcom has found the bug.
The harder question is who used to find it.
