Next year, I'll be sitting on my couch with a controller in hand, but on my TV, I'll be up in the sky, chasing enemy planes through the clouds at 10,000 feet. In 2026, Bandai Namco will launch Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the next game in the near-future air combat simulator series.
Hours before The Game Awards, held Dec. 11 in Los Angeles, I walked into a nearby hotel room and sat down with Kazutoki Kono, Ace Combat series brand director, and Manabu Shimamoto, producer of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, to chat about the game. As the game's predecessor, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, came out in 2019, this will be the first game in the franchise to come out 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 harness modern gaming hardware and developed a graphics technology to simulate cloud physics (called, yes, Cloudly). This not only realistically trails your aircraft wings through the clouds as you carve a path through the sky, but this also allows for the tactical advantage you'll get when picking out an enemy plane in the distance by its contrails after leaving a cloud bank.
That's the kind of true-to-life realism that Project Aces sought out, which is why they interviewed former combat pilots to advise them on the modern realities of flying fighter jets.
"What they told us is that it's too scary to go into clouds; [they] actually avoid it altogether," Shimamoto said through a translator. "Which means the players and the pilot in the game actually have a lot more courage than the real fighter jet pilot!"
Jokes aside, it reflects the careful line that the Ace Combat series has walked between slavish simulator and unrealistic arcade game. It gives the games serious stakes while loosening up some of the more tedious realities of flight (to say nothing of a near-endless bay of missiles).
"We are going for a certain level of reality, but we do want to give the player a lot of decision-making agency for Ace Combat 8," Shimamoto said.
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Ace Combat 8 replicates real-world jets in the fictional setting of Strangereal. Bandai Namco
When to keep it real and when to get Strangereal
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