Bandai Namco Entertainment published a Developer Diary featuring Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve’s dev team on April 10. The behind-the-scenes video details some of the new features and technical details of the series’ long-awaited next mainline entry.
According to Keiichi Yamaguchi, one of Ace Combat 8’s art directors, the new 3D flight shooter will bring a “serious upgrade” to fighter aircraft models. The models use 4k textures (previously 1k), and their polygon count is roughly six times higher compared to the previous installment. An abundance of weapons also awaits across land, sea, and air, and according to art director Masato Kanno, weapons are designed to be linked together rather than operate independently, which will be expressed both through the game and the story. This means you’ll see things get transported by carrier and assembled at the destination, for example.
Ace Combat 8 producer Manabu Shimomoto also expands a bit on the game’s new cloud engine, which was briefly mentioned back when the game was initially announced in December last year. Replacing third-party middleware, the new proprietary engine called Cloudly has allowed the developers to create a dogfighting field with heavily layered clouds. This will, according to Shimomoto, play a big role in allowing players to actually feel the velocity (which is hard to tell if you’re traversing an empty space) through feedback such as the sensation of “piercing the clouds.”
Additionally, with the game being developed in Unreal Engine 5, use of Lumen (the engine’s dynamic illumination and reflections system) will give Ace Combat 8 an even more photorealistic look, especially paired with the improved 3D models. Speaking of photorealism, the developers apparently took over 1,000 HDRI photos and 3D scans (per team) of real-life hangars, based on which they created the game’s environments.
Aside from the human drama told through its singleplayer campaign and a new training mode for practicing rules and moves, Ace Combat 8 will also come with the “biggest” online mode in the series’ history, as the developers describe it.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve will launch in 2026 for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S.
