Capcom reveals next-gen successor to its RE Engine
Capcom revealed that it’s working on a next-gen version of its much-vaunted RE Engine. This engine is the powerful but flexible technology running under the hood of the company’s hits from the Resident Evil 4 Remake to Street Fighter 6.
In a presentation to developers posted on Capcom’s R&D channel on YouTube—and first spotted by X user Okami Games—the company talked about how it was working on the “RE Engine’s future.” As part of this, it talked about some of the challenges the engine faces, such as the high degree of customization required for each game built on it.
Capcom’s solution which it has dubbed a “new standard of engine” it has codenamed “REX,” short for “RE ENGINE is the neXt generation.” It’s an awkward acronym for sure, but it isn’t the first time Capcom has done this, with the RE Engine’s full name being the “REach for the Moon Engine.”
As for what Capcom’s next-gen REX will bring over the standard RE Engine, the company is promising a set of eight new technologies dubbed “RE+X.” These are REDox, REUI, RELog, REFlows, REAssetStream, REProfiler, RELauncher and RERuntime.
While what each of these does has yet to be detailed by Capcom, their names do provide some hints, with REUI likely to have to do with in-game user interfaces and REAssetStream probably representing improvements to how the engine streams video game assets from storage.
As for when the next-gen REX engine will be rolled out, the presentation states that it won’t just outright replace the RE Engine. Instead, each of the RE+X technologies will instead be rolled out in phases. So some of them might be found in some of Capcom’s upcoming RE Engine games, such as Dragon’s Dogma 2 or the upcoming Monster Hunter sequel.
Beyond that, REX’s technological advancements may find their way to non-Capcom games. The presentation seems to hint that Capcom is looking to commercialize its next-gen RE Engine in a manner likely similar to Epic’s Unreal. So far, the video only mentions government and external applications. However, it’s not hard to imagine other developers licensing the engine for their own games.
If Capcom were to move in this direction, then it would give developers more engine options to develop their games on. This is great news at a time when developers’ choices for engines are becoming more limited, especially in light of game engine Unity’s changes to its terms of service that have turned off many developers from using it.
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