It was good while it lasted. During a recent presentation, Capcom has officially embraced AI technologies as “essential” to its future projects, and will aim to integrate it as much as possible into its exceptional RE engine. This is apparently all done under the pretext of efficiency and faster development, but I fear it won’t be long before it extends to the most visible parts of their games.
As reported by Gamebiz (via IGN), Capcom held the “Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026” on Oct. 2, during which its programmer Satoshi Ishida presented project REX, which is meant to evolve Capcom’s fantastic RE engine into a more efficient software tool that’ll be easier to use for an increasing number of developers.
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Tasks like “making small corrections and checking movement” were simply too time consuming for Capcom, thus prompting more work on streamlining the development process. Unfortunately, that means AI will come into play, and not only for code. “Successfully integrating AI technology into development procedures has become a prerequisite for streamlining future development,” Gamebiz writes (machine translated).
Capcom’s overall struggle with increasing the RE engine’s efficiency has culminated in evolving the software to the “game engine of the AI generation.”
“It has the great advantage of being not only easy to use for human developers, but also easy to read and understand for AI. The unified base language will enable AI to understand and automatically create programs, and to conduct test plays to automatically check for bugs in the future,” Gamebiz reports.
So, as illustrated here, AI will be automatically creating entire programs, perhaps whole environments even, but what’s most disappointing to me is that Capcom seems to be pursuing QA automation, with AI handling playtests instead of actual people. With how hallucinogenic AI workloads are, I have a feeling Capcom will wind up spending a lot more time checking if the AI made any mistakes and fix them, perhaps even post-launch, than it would have by simply letting trained humans work on it.
Ultimately, though, Capcom’s stated goal is to “make games together with AI,” and that, to me, is as dreadful as it sounds. I loved what Capcom has been able to come up with by innovating on its engine all the way back in 2017 and building a shared base for each of its development branches, allowing for quick reuse of photogrammetric textures and other assets and code between games. Whether AI was really necessary doesn’t seem clear, but, of course, if a massive corporation can cut costs even by a single percent, it will do so.
I, however, will never stand behind this. I never loved AI and never will. All it is is a glorified search tool that reached far beyond what its purpose originally was and always, inevitably, brings down creativity and creates a negative feedback loop of worsening humans producing worse input which it’s trained on and then becomes worse itself.
