Next year I'll be sitting on the couch with a controller in my hand, but on TV I'll be in the sky chasing enemy planes through the clouds at 10,000 feet. Bandai Namco will launch in 2026 Ace Combat 8: Wings of Thevethe next game in the series of near-future air combat simulators.
Hours ago Game rewardsheld on December 11th in Los Angeles, I walked into an adjacent hotel room and sat down with Kazutoki Kono, brand director of the Ace Combat series, and Manabu Shimamoto, producer of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, to talk about the game. Since the game's predecessor, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, released in 2019, this will be the first game in the franchise to release on consoles this generation (as well as PC).
Ace Combat 8 includes a virtual hanger with many new features. The team behind the series, Project Aces, pushed the visuals to use modern gaming hardware and developed graphics technology for simulating cloud physics (yes, called Cloudly). Not only does this realistically pull your plane's wings through the clouds as you navigate the sky, but it also gives you the tactical advantage of spotting an enemy plane in the distance via its contrails after emerging from the cloud.
This kind of realistic realism was what Project Aces were looking for, so they interviewed former combat pilots to advise them on the modern realities of fighter jet flying.
“They told us it was too scary to go into the clouds; [they] in fact, avoid it altogether,” Shimamoto said through a translator. “This means that the players and pilot in the game actually have much more courage than a real fighter pilot!”
Jokes aside, this reflects the clear line that the Ace Combat series has drawn between a slave simulator and an unrealistic arcade game. This ups the stakes of the game while freeing you from some of the more tedious realities of flight (not to mention the nearly endless bay of rockets).
“We're aiming for a certain level of reality, but we want to give the player more freedom to make decisions in Ace Combat 8,” Shimamoto said.
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Ace Combat 8 reproduces real aircraft in the fictional world of Strangereal.
When to Keep it Real and When to Get Strangereal
Consulting pilots provided the Project Aces team with details of aerial combat that they could use to enhance realism—for example, the ability to spot distant enemy aircraft by the sunlight reflecting off their cockpits, much like the glare of a sniper scope in first-person shooters like Battlefield 6. But that realism is tempered by another feature of the Ace Combat series: its setting, Strangereal, is a fantasy world. nations in which there is a constantly seething war, which one way or another changes from game to game.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve takes place 10 years after the events of its predecessor, in the somewhat distant future of 2029. The Federation of Central Usea (FCU) was defeated and completely submitted to the Sotoa Republic. The player, an unnamed pilot, wakes up floating in the ocean after a fierce dogfight, but is rescued by an obsolete aircraft carrier filled with the last bastions of FCU forces.
Forced to retreat from an outdated aircraft, the player begins Ace Combat 8 in a chaotic situation with a ragtag crew that his regular pilot will become closer to. It's clear that the Project Aces team is looking for more interpersonal experiences on the ship to contrast with the fast-paced dogfights. To further enhance the underdog feel, the player character takes on the mantle of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot of yesteryear.
On the aging aircraft carrier USS Endurance, where the game is set, players will strengthen bonds with the ship's crew between missions.
The Strangereal setting of the Ace Combat series has become a beloved element of the franchise. Filled with vague equivalents of modern nations and multinational alliances, the countries of Usea, Osea, Erusea, Sotoa and others sound straight out of George Orwell's 1984, but the fictional appearance gives the games license to stage high-stakes international clashes and melodrama.
In each game in the series, players will become familiar with the vicissitudes of global politics and military turns. This is all the result of painstaking and intense research into history and world-building that may not even be represented in the game.
Even during the planning stages of the game, the team physically pulled out a map of Strangerial to plan the invasions. According to Kono, they played the roles of different nations invading and counter-attacking the geography of their world. All of this contributes to the game world, but invisibly. For example, the team created the culture and history of the antagonist country Sotoa, but players can only hint at this in the country's flag.
In terms of planning, “I want to say 10% is what you see in the game,” Kono said.
Project Aces, the team behind Ace Combat 8, has developed new Cloudly technology to create advanced cloud effects that players can fly through.
What to take and what to change from our world in Ace Combat 8
New Cloudly technology and graphics in Ace Combat 8 bring the game closer to photorealism, and many of the fighters in the game are carefully recreated based on their real-life counterparts. However, in some areas the Project Aces team strayed from reality. Strangereal's game setting allows them to shape the use of military technology that deviates from real-life battlefields in certain ways to make the gameplay more fun for players – something they learned from how players responded to previous games.
“In Ace Combat 7 we actually included a lot of UAVs. [unmanned aerial vehicles]but the feedback we received from fans was that they really enjoyed the hand-to-hand combat experience with radio chatter and heated discussions and conversations,” Kono said.
Even as the real world of aviation shifts towards unmanned drones and firing missiles at unseen enemy aircraft far over the horizon, Ace Combat still needs to maintain a level of gameplay action for players to enjoy it.
“There will always be this line of reality that we will strive for. However, we still cannot walk this line to the detriment of the player experience. Ensuring that the player has fun will always be a priority for us as a game design philosophy,” said Kono.
The F-18E fighter is well suited for aircraft carriers and is therefore the game's mascot.
Although the game will be released sometime next year, there are other aspects that the developers were unable to reveal, including how many planes will be in the game. But both Kono and Shimamoto agree on one thing: their favorite plane.
“Ace Combat takes a lot of existing fighters from the real world and integrates them into the game, so of course I love them all. But I’m going to highlight the F-18E Super Hornet,” Shimamoto said.
It helps that the F-18E is heavily featured in the trailer, and it's no coincidence that it's one of the most famous aircraft on aircraft carriers. It follows the setting of Ace Combat 8 on its own venerable aircraft carrier. Kono, as the director of the Ace Combat series, admits that he tends to fall in love with the jet used as a key image in each game (like the hero you see on the box cover), spending so much time looking at it that he begins to notice and appreciate the small details.
“For example, when I look at the nose cone of an F-18, I notice this little hole. What is this hole for? Or the way the bolts are positioned, or where the parts connect. I’m starting to notice things like that,” Kono said.
As I lay on the couch with the controller in my hand, I struggle to make out details like this, but something tells me I'll have to dodge enemy Sotoa Republic aircraft while trying to take advantage of those beautifully rendered cloud edges.
