Capcom unveils their plans for the next iteration of the RE Engine, codenamed "REX Engine"
Capcom has held a steady and high quality standard when it comes to their latest AAA titles, and a huge part of this comes thanks to their proprietary engine that debuted with Resident Evil 7 back in 2017, codenamed "RE Engine".
Since RE7, the RE Engine has been used almost in all titles released since then, taking into account every Resident Evil title since 2017, including Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 2 Remake, Resident Evil 3 Remake and its side companion Resident Evil: Resistance, Resident Evil 8 (Village), and the most recent Resident Evil 4 Remake released back in April. But not only has Resident Evil benefited from the RE Engine, the latest titles in other franchises like Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Exoprimal, Devil May Cry, Pragmata and Dragon's Dogma have all been using the RE Engine.
With the growing demands of technology and hardware, Capcom's Research and Development team released today a video through their YouTube channel regarding the engine powering their latest titles for more than 6 years, the current state of the engine and what are the plans going forward for the highly acclaimed engine, with Capcom listing the following challenges to overcome for the current iteration of the engine:
RE Engine's Future said:RE Engine Challenges
= Need a new standard of engine
- Expansion and diversification of project scale
- Need to efficiently handle large volumes of large size assets
- Need for a high degree of customization per title
- Used by overseas subcontractors, multinationalization of team members
- Importance of documentation, samples and localization
- Increase in the number of mid-career and new graduates with commercial game engine experience
- Increased demand for customizability and usability
Codename REX: RE neXt Engine
Given the challenges, Capcom has decided to create a new standard for the engine, and instead of making an entirely new engine from scratch, they are focusing their efforts on polishing and improving the existing RE Engine with features from their so called "next" plans. The current RE Engine will see the new technologies implemented gradually and in phases:
REX Development Direction said:New technology (RE + X) is to be introduced to the existing RE Engine in phases
- REDox
- REUI
- RELog
- REFlows
- REAssetStream
- REProfiler
- RELauncher
- RERuntime
No further information was shared about said technologies, but they promised more details at another time.