Next year I’ll be sitting on my couch with a controller in my hand, but on my TV I’ll be in the sky, chasing enemy planes through the clouds at 10,000 feet in the air. In 2026, Bandai Namco will launch Ace Combat 8: Wings of Thevethe next game in the air combat simulator series in the near future.
Hours before Game rewardsheld on December 11 in Los Angeles, I walked into a nearby 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 discuss the game. As the game’s predecessor, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, was released in 2019, this will be the first game in the franchise to be released on this generation of consoles (as well as PC).
Ace Combat 8 includes a virtual hanger full of new features. The team behind the series, Project Aces, pushed the visuals to leverage modern gaming hardware and developed graphics technology to simulate cloud physics (called, yes, Cloudly). Not only does this allow for realistic tracking of your plane’s wings through the clouds as you make your way through the sky, but it also allows for the tactical advantage you’ll gain from spotting an enemy plane in the distance thanks to its trails after leaving a cloud bank.
That’s the kind of gritty realism Project Aces strives for, which is why they interviewed former combat pilots to advise them on the modern realities of flying combat aircraft.
“What they told us is that it’s too scary to go into the clouds; [they] “Actually, avoid it altogether,” Shimamoto said through a translator. “Which means that the players and pilot of the game actually have much more courage than the real fighter jet pilot!”
All joking aside, this reflects the careful line the Ace Combat series has walked between slavish simulator and unrealistic arcade game. This gives the games serious stakes while easing some of the more tedious realities of flying (not to mention a near-endless missile bay).
“We’re aiming for a certain level of reality, but we want to give the player a lot of decision-making freedom for Ace Combat 8,” Shimamoto said.
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Ace Combat 8 replicates real-world jets in the fictional setting of Strangereal.
When to Keep It Real and When to Get Strangereal
Consulting pilots provided the Project Aces team with air combat details that they could incorporate to enhance realism – such as being able to spot distant enemy planes by sunlight reflecting off their cockpits, much like the reflections from sniper scopes in first-person shooter games like Battlefield 6. But this realism is tempered by another feature of the Ace Combat series: its setting, Strangereal, is a world of fictional nations hosting an ever-changing war. choppy that oscillates one way or another from one game to another.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve takes place 10 years after its predecessor, in the somewhat distant future of 2029. The Federation of Central Uses (FCU) has been defeated and completely subjugated by the Republic of Sotoa. The player, an anonymous pilot, wakes up floating in the ocean after a fierce aerial battle, only to be rescued by an obsolete aircraft carrier filled with the last holdouts of the FCU forces.
Forced to take a step back with an outdated aircraft, the player starts Ace Combat 8 in a disjointed situation with a motley crew that their ordinary pilot will become close to. It’s clear that the Project Aces team is aiming for more interpersonal experiences aboard the ship to contrast with the fast-paced dogfights. To add to the underdog feel, the player character assumes the role of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot of yesteryear.
On the aging aircraft carrier Endurance, the game’s setting, players will develop bonds with the ship’s crew between missions.
The Strangereal setting in the Ace Combat series has become a beloved element of the franchise. Filled with vague analogues 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 veneer gives the games the license to feature high-stakes international clashes and melodrama.
In each game in the series, players encounter twists and turns in world politics and military reversals. This is all the result of laboriously intensive backstory and worldbuilding that may not even be represented in the game.
While still in the planning stages of the game, the team physically pulled out a map of Strangereal to plan invasions. They played the roles of different nations as they invaded and counterattacked across their world’s geography, Kono said. All of this contributes to the game world but doesn’t show. As an example, the team has built up the culture and history of the antagonist country Sotoa, but players will only get hints of it in the country’s flag.
Regarding the planning done, “10%, I mean, that’s what you see in the game,” Kono said.
Project Aces, the team behind Ace Combat 8, developed new Cloudly technology to create advanced cloud effects that players can hover over.
What to take and what to change from our world in Ace Combat 8
Ace Combat 8’s new Cloudly and graphics technology bring the game closer to photorealism, and the game’s litany of fighter jets are meticulously recreated from their real-life counterparts. However, the Aces Project team has strayed from reality in some areas. The game’s Strangereal setting allows them to shape their use of war technologies that stray from real-world battlefields in specific ways to make the game more fun for players – something they’ve learned from how players have responded to previous games.
“In Ace Combat 7, we actually included a lot of drones [unmanned aerial vehicles]”, but the feedback we received from fans was that they actually enjoyed the experience of man-on-man dogfighting with the radio chatter and lively discussions and conversations,” Kono said.
Even as the real world of aviation evolves toward unmanned drones and firing missiles at unseen enemy planes far beyond the horizon, Ace Combat must still maintain a level of gameplay for players to enjoy.
“There will always be that line of reality that we want to aim for. That being said, we still can’t opt for that line at the expense of the player experience. That the player is having fun will always be a priority for us as a game design philosophy,” Kono said.
The F-18E fighter jet is well suited to aircraft carriers and is therefore the game’s mascot.
Even though the game will be released next year, there are other aspects that the developers haven’t been able to talk about, including how many planes will be in the game. But Kono and Shimamoto agree on one thing: their favorite plane.
“Ace Combat takes a lot of real-world fighter jets and puts them into the game, so of course I love them all. But I’m going to specifically call out the F-18E Super Hornet,” Shimamoto said.
It helps that the F-18E features heavily in the trailer, and it’s no coincidence that it’s one of the most famous jets stationed on aircraft carriers. It fits the Ace Combat 8 setting on its own venerable aircraft carrier. Kono, as director of the Ace Combat series, admits that he tends to fall in love with the jet used as each game’s key visual – like the hero you see on the box – spending so much time looking at it that he begins to notice and appreciate the granular details.
“For example, looking at the nose of the F-18, I notice this little hole. What is this hole for? Or the way the bolts are aligned, or where the parts come together. I’m starting to notice those kinds of things,” Kono said.
When I’m on my couch, controller in hand, I’ll do my best to look up details like that, but something tells me I’m going to be stuck evading Republic of Sotoa enemy planes while trying to take advantage of those beautifully rendered cloud edges.
