During The Game Awards 2025, Bandai Namco Entertainment surprised Ace Combat fans with a long-awaited announcement of the series’ next mainline entry. Titled Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the new flight shooter will launch in 2026 for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S. Along with the announcement, Ace Combat series director Kazutoki Kono and Ace Combat 8 producer Manabu Shimomoto shared some details about the new game in an interview with Famitsu.
According to the developers, work on Ace Combat 8 started back in 2020, made possible by the massive success of its predecessor AC7 (which has sold over 7 million units to date). While a big goal of the project was to make a modern Ace Combat game that could hold its ground among recent cutting-edge, high-budget games, the devs were aware “that not everything should be new.”
“We kept the things fans have loved for 30 years, and thought about what changes would please them,” Shimomoto says. The three pillars they identified as fundamental to the Ace Combat series’ identity, and thus the new entry too, were the exhilaration of freely flying through the sky; the excitement of shooting down enemies based on your own judgement; and the sense of accomplishment from overcoming challenges and becoming an ace pilot.
On the other hand, Ace Combat 8 will bring some interesting technical innovations. Though it’s built in Unreal Engine 5, the game uses Bandai Namco Aces’s new proprietary cloud engine Cloudly, replacing the third-party weather tool trueSKY. Thanks to this, Kono says his team was able to push past some of the limitations they previously faced. Clouds will be more layered and differ in characteristics depending on altitude. Like in AC7, the realism of the environment is not only cosmetic, but functional, meant to give the player various types of feedback. The increased attention to visual cues means pilots will spend less time checking instruments.
Another characteristic of AC8 are its first-person real-time cinematic scenes. While story progression will work like in previous titles for the most part, during story scenes, the player will be able to move their line of sight and look around – this decision was made to give the player the feeling that they’re still involved, as opposed to a fully static cutscene. “By deliberately looking away, you may discover new things, such as what other characters are doing in the background while the conversation is happening,” Kono explains. As a treat, the team has also implemented cockpit cameras for some scenes, displaying pilots as they interact.
Fans of the series will be happy to know that Sunao Katabuchi, who wrote the scenarios for AC4, 5 and 7, came back as scenario writer for the new entry. His involvement, combined with a new dogfight map spanning 10,000 square kilometres, makes Ace Combat 8 sound like a promising comeback for the franchise.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve will launch in 2026 for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S.
