A lot has happened since the release of 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. Of course, the elephant in the room is the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of which on the video games industry is still being felt today. From the explosion in engagement when many people were forced to stay inside and quarantine, to the massive contraction with seemingly endless studio layoffs and closures happening now.
With the world as isolated as it was, there was a need for human connection. That became the underlying theme of the upcoming entry in the Ace Combat flight sim series, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve.
I recently played four hours of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve and spoke with director Kazutoki Kono about the game’s storytelling, the franchise’s three pillars, and the possibility of a virtual reality mode.
A New Direction
The events in Ace Combat 8 take place 10 years after those of the previous game. The war between the Federation of Central Usea (FCU) and the country of Sotoa rages on.
Players control an initially nameless man who’s the co-pilot of the legendary ace aviator Jan “Rex” Cope, leader of the FCU’s Joker squadron. After Rex’s death, the player adopts his “Wings of Theve” callsign in order to carry on his legacy. “Rex” has to maintain the facade that the original is still alive, as his presence inspires hope and boosts morale within the squadron, and instils fear within opposing forces.
It’s a markedly different shift in tone to the story in Ace Combat 7, which revolved around the protagonist clearing his name after being falsely accused. Ace Combat 8’s development began during the middle of the pandemic, and Kono said that he sent a message to narrative director Sunao Katabuchi asking if he was interested in coming back on board, to which he agreed to.
“We were both wearing masks back then, and we began to talk about the sort of narrative structure and what we want to achieve,” Kono explained. While he and Katabuchi didn’t have anything in stone quite yet at that point, one of the messages that Katabuchi sent stood out. “[Katabuchi] said, ‘I think the theme for Ace Combat 8 should be the connection between souls of people.’”
During my time with the game, one of the big changes that I immediately noticed was the use of actual animated cutscenes similar to what you’d see in a first-person shooter like Call of Duty. In Ace Combat 7, almost all of the cutscenes were relegated to still images with a narrator explaining ongoing events. This time around, we actually get insight into Rex’s psyche. This approach was much more engaging, especially since the supporting wingmen in your squadron are also quite colorful.
Ellington Baxter is a dependable teammate whose steadfast personality keeps the group level-headed, while Tasha Seversky is the pink-haired young hotshot that treats war like some sort of game. When they talk, their portraits appear in the top right corner, like Star Fox, and they add a lot of entertaining moments in between the intense dogfighting.
The three pillars
According to Kono, the franchise has three pillars: photorealistic skies, enemy engagement, and the experience of being an ace pilot. In my demo, I flew through above the blue ocean across the skies, encountering plenty of clouds along the way. And every time I flew into a cloud, my screen would be peppered with these impressively realistic water droplets.
Kono said that the clouds were rendered with an in-house engine called Cloudly, which helps make authentic layers. Not only did the development team want to make the clouds beautiful, but also give them function to help players.
“When water hits the cockpit, that in and of itself is a sign to the player that they’re now inside of a cloud, and oftentimes when you see rain or you’re feeling rain in the cloud, that means you’re at low altitude,” he explained.
Kono continued, “Whereas if you have very thin clouds, you’re at higher altitude, so you can actually use the visual cue that the cloud is telling you to gather information that you can use for gameplay and decision making.”
The series continues to reiterate on its existing systems, including flight and combat. In fact, Kono said that there was an overhaul as to how damage is calculated. In prior games, there were containers called “blocks” that were active targets that would recognize hit and collision. In Ace Combat 8, however, there are now elements outside of these blocks that can actually take damage.
“There was certainly a lot of trial and error to go from that older system to redefining the rules in how players can engage with and damage objects in Ace Combat 8,” he explained.
The aforementioned new cinematic cutscene direction serves the third pillar, and the first-person point-of-view is meant to provide a “hero” experience. The team took several steps to make them feel as realistic as possible.
When recording the voice actors, there were three different microphones in the studio with them to capture a more encompassing sound. Additionally, the sound was captured in 7.1.4, emulating a home-theater setup.
Kono said, “It gives the player the sensation of becoming and immersing themselves in this idea of an ace pilot. So every system and mechanic that we have needs to feed one of the three pillars.”
Mission complete
I played through several missions. Mission 4, “The Fall of the Numbered Fleets,” felt like a standard mission, where I was tasked with taking down a once-friendly fleet that turned on the FCU. Admittedly, I’m not the best at playing Ace Combat games. My sense of direction is often tested, but Ace Combat 8 does a good job of providing plenty of tutorials and markers to help ease you into the controls.
Here, I was shooting missiles and machine gun fire into enemy planes and dropping bombs onto naval fleets. It felt incredibly cathartic and satisfying when the green pop up in the middle of my screen kept saying “HIT” and then finally “DESTROYED.”
Mission 11, “Maximum Payload,” was a visual stunner. This mission was nothing but pure skies, where I was tasked with taking down two gigantic transportation cargo with eight separate engines each. As these cargo planes were using the clouds as cover, I followed suit and constantly experienced the condensation and droplets scattered across my screen, showing off the power of the Cloudly engine.
Mission 9, “The Land Battleship Blocklade,” was by far my favorite one. As the name implies, my squad and I had to stop a hulking land battleship fitted with anti-air guns from advancing. Its sole weakness was its armor-plated tracks, where my allies would deploy suicide drones to blow off the armor while the aerial forces would destroy the exposed tracks. So not only did I have to fight off enemy planes, and the battleship itself, but I also had to guard the drones so that they’d make it to their destination.
It was a multi-faceted mission that felt insurmountable. On top of that, part of the mission was to detonate pre-planted bombs on three buildings around the battleship so it’d be immobilized. Of course, something goes wrong and it was up to me to manually destroy the buildings. Despite how relatively grounded and realistic the series is, this mission felt like something out of an anime. The teamwork and camaraderie felt palpable throughout this entire mission.
Going virtual
You know what would make missions like these even more exciting and immersive? Virtual reality! Ace Combat 7 had three exclusive VR missions, but it seems like this feature isn’t currently on the cards for Ace Combat 8.
Kono cited the challenge of developing for VR. When doing so, you’re essentially rendering twice—one for the left eye and one for the right. As opposed to a flat screen experience, developing for VR takes more than twice the computing power to render.
However, VR was considered at one point. Kono explained, “Do we scale back the graphics and the performance of the game to one half of what it could potentially be in order to accommodate the VR experiences? or do we use all of that computing power and put it on the screen and create the best possible flat screen experience that we can?”
The team decided on the latter, and Kono revealed that resources are being poured into multiplayer, which he called the franchise’s most fleshed out yet (with more details coming soon).
Ace Combat 8’s release syncs up perfectly for the franchise’s 30th anniversary. Ace Combat 7 is the highest-selling entry in the series, but I feel like Wings of Theve will be able to overtake that. Despite being a cult-classic franchise, it’s still going strong decades later. “The Ace Combat franchise never had an easy development cycle,” Kono smirked. “We are constantly scrapping and building.”
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve launches on October 2, 2026, for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and Series S.
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