AI and Video Games: The Creators of Resident Evil Have Found the Magic Formula

More than 27 Capcom titles run on the RE Engine, and around 2,000 developers work on it. On October 2, during its open conference RE:2026, the Japanese publisher unveiled REX, a long-term project intended to transform its proprietary engine into an “AI-generation game engine”.Behind the label lies a series of subprojects with clear code names—RE:Dox, RE:UI, RE:Log, RE:Flows, and RE:Runtime—spanning everything from code documentation to runtime tools.

Code included, written and tested by the machine

Programmer Satoshi Ishida summed up the ambition before the audience: “In the future, AI will be able to understand programs and create them automatically, or run game tests to detect bugs”. The company’s goal, in its own words, is “a future in which we will create games with AI”. The core of REX is to make the engine’s innards readable to humans and models alike, a prerequisite for the latter to contribute without breaking anything. The first two building blocks, devoted to documentation and logs, have already been released as open source.

As early as 2025, Capcom’s teams were already demonstrating an internal tool relying on Google’s models to sift through hundreds of thousands of ideas for game objects. REX extends this logic to the entire engine, all the way down to the code that runs the games.

And what about the promise made to players?

On February 16, 2026, before its individual shareholders, Capcom had pledged not to implement any AI-generated elements in the content of its games. The pledge had two parts: AI-powered tools to improve productivity, with experiments in graphics, sound, and programming, and a strict prohibition on the content side. REX carries out the first part without touching the second.The report on the October 2 conference does not, moreover, use the term “generative AI” even once. AI stops at the door of the workshop: the worlds players traverse remain designed, composed, and written by humans.

Square Enix aims, for its part, to automate 70% of its quality assurance and debugging by the end of 2027, a target announced in November 2025. The publisher of Final Fantasy has since announced, in March, the integration of Google’s Gemini AI into Dragon Quest X. At the same time, Ubisoft’s CEO described AI as “a revolution as significant for our industry as the transition to 3D”. Electronic Arts, for its part, partnered with Stability AI to generate textures for its games. Since February, Capcom has formally limited the exercise.

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Source: Gamebiz