Revealed during last week's Game Awards, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is a long-awaited return for anyone who's yearned for AC's pairing of photorealistic combat aircraft and anime-tier emotional intensity. But in an interview with Famitsu, series director Kazutoki Kono and AC8 producer Manabu Shimomoto said it's more than another sequel: It's a chance to turn Ace Combat's cult following into a global phenomenon.
"Sales of Ace Combat 7 will soon reach 7 million units. With the further success of Ace Combat 8, we hope to bring the series to even more customers around the world," Shimomoto said via machine translation. "We hope to eventually reach the 50th anniversary, and we are developing AC8 as a turning point for the series."
To achieve that, Kono said the developers at Project Aces have devoted themselves to what they believe are the three core pillars of Ace Combat:
- "The exhilaration of flying freely through the sky"
- "The excitement and pleasure of shooting down enemies one after another using your own judgment"
- "The sense of accomplishment of overcoming adversity to become an ace pilot"
"Our goal was to maximize the strengths of Ace Combat through new ideas and technology," Kono said.
To begin with, Ace Combat 8 is—quite literally—bigger. In previous AC games, various rendering and presentational trickeries made it feel like the battlefields you were soaring over and hammering with ATGMs were life-sized, but in actuality, they were created at 1/10 scale. AC8 will be the first time that the series will be operating on a 1:1 scale.
"There were many challenges, but the most difficult was recreating every last detail on such a vast scale," Shimomoto said. "The dogfight maps are designed to allow players to fly freely across a vast space spanning 10,000 square kilometers."
AC8 won't just give pilots wider skies to fly in; Kono said the skies themselves will be a more reactive warzone thanks to Cloudly, a new engine developed in-house at Bandai Namco Studios designed to both give clouds a visual upgrade and let players read the sky to improve their situational awareness.
"I personally am not particularly interested in improved visuals without improved functionality. In AC7, the effect of flying into clouds naturally sent signals to the player, and we are looking for similar visual features that allow players to naturally learn the game rules as they play repeatedly," Kono said. "Contrails and smoke created by enemy aircraft and canopy reflections all send signals to the player. These features let players naturally discover and interpret signals as they play to influence their decisions."
Additionally, clouds will form differently based on their altitude, which Kono said can serve as a good enough natural altimeter that he found himself checking his instruments less frequently in AC8 than in previous games.
AC8 is also adopting a new visual format for its story, which will be told through real-time first person cutscenes that let the player control where their character's looking—something Shimomoto said gives "a stronger sense of being in the action."
But while Ace Combat might be exploring new ways to tell its stories, it sounds like it'll stay true to its spirit: Asked whether the radio chatter from other pilots in AC8 will still be delivered with the series' trademark melodrama, Kono said "of course."
"I consider radio communication to be one of the key innovations of Ace Combat," Kono said—which might be a bit strong, but I'll give him the benefit of the machine translation doubt. "This time too, you will be able to get in the cockpit and fly around the battlefield, learning about the passionate drama around you."
Music to my ears. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is set to release sometime in 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam now.
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