Ever since it was created in 2014, Capcom’s Reach for the Moon Engine (or RE Engine as it is more commonly known) has been pretty revolutionary in the video game world, creating visually stunning games starting with the highly acclaimed Resident Evil 7 and would go on to be the backbone of several other incredible games such as Resident Evil 2: Remake, Devil May Cry 5 and Street Fighter 6. So it’s no surprise that it’s a massive announcement that Capcom is working on the REX Engine, the next evolution of their in-house engine as revealed on a Capcom R&D presentation on October 25th.
The new engine, the REX Engine (RE neXt Engine is its full name) is currently set to be the future of Capcom’s games, improving on the RE Engine and allowing the almost decade-old engine to keep up with modern-day standards:
Rather than building an entirely new engine from scratch, REX will gradually introduce the new RE+X technology into the existing RE Engine. In this way, we will raise the current RE Engine to next-generation level.
They plan to reveal the individual parts of this upgraded engine at another time, though they did show a diagram of the plans for the phases of development moving forward: REDox, REUI, RELog, REFlows, REAssetStream, REProfiler, RELauncher, RERuntime. The launcher in particular will probably be of interest to Capcom gamers, as individualized launchers is a contentious topic, though it should be clear that we don’t know the exact details of what an “RELauncher” actually means.
Still, all these plans may be subject to change and the vanilla RE Engine still looks to be Capcom’s main engine at least for the immediate future, as Dragon’s Dogma 2 is on said engine, as well as Pragmata and Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. However, it’s reassuring that one of the industry leaders is not content to rest on their laurels and is looking to improve upon their engine and provide a better experience for their audience moving forward.