Capcom reveals plans to "create games together with AI"

At a technology conference last week, Capcom revealed that they want to evolve its in house game engine using the buzzword of 2026 – AI.

Capcom’s current RE Engine has produced 30 games since Resident Evil 7 was released in 2017 and so far this year, the company seems to be on a generational run.

With Resident Evil Requiem, Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword which each received universal critical acclaim, the company seems to be doing just fine without AI.

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But as reported by GameBiz, at the conference programmer Satoshi Ishida described the next step as an "AI game engine" as part of the company’s REX initiative.

Integrating AI into the engine will enhance efficiency across development, allowing for play tests to check for bugs among other advantages. And since the REX initiative uses a simpler programming language, this will be easy for AI to understand.

Ishida also stated that Capcom’s goal is eventually to not only to use AI as an optimisation tool, but to "create games together with AI."

Capcom also plans to make some of this AI tech accessible via the internet to allow the public to help them with AI training.

But despite this heavy focus on AI, the company has previously emphasised that they don’t want to use AI to replace art, but rather as a tool for potential.

Speaking to 4Gamer.net, Capcom’s VP of game development platform and AI solutions, Shinichi Inoue, previously had this to say on AI: "The idea is simple. We want to return to the state of the past, when people discussed interesting ideas, reached a consensus, and then brought them to life."

"Back then, everyone involved in development fully understood the context and intentions, which allowed for maximum performance.

"That’s why we want to provide a contextual model for person-to-person communication and clarify intentions. Our ultimate goal is to provide a medium that facilitates collaboration."

Capcom technical director, Kazuki Abe, also added: "The goal is to replace the routine tasks that arise in conjunction with creative work with AI."

"Humans must always guarantee quality, so humans control the input where commands are given to the AI ​​and the output where the results are produced."

Whether AI will be used in future games as merely a performance enhancer or have a bigger role remains to be seen. However, Capcom seems to be taking a collaborative approach to AI, and perhaps, with some experimentation, triple A games could see faster development times among other optimisations.

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