Ace Combat 8: WINGS OF THEVE, the Ace Combat series’ first mainline entry in seven years, is set to release on October 2 for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S. Together with a new walkthrough trailer detailing gameplay and customization, the devs at Project Aces recently shared some anecdotes from the development process itself, especially regarding how the game’s high level of realism was achieved.
In a joint media interview attended by GameWatch, Ace Combat franchise director Kazutoki Kono and Ace Combat 8 producer Manabu Shimomoto say that when it comes to licensing real-life aircraft, the thing manufacturers care about most is accurate visual representation, but achieving it is anything but easy. “Naturally, we put a great deal of effort into ensuring everything is as accurate as possible, but fighter jets are essentially bundles of military secrets, so there are aspects you simply can’t fully recreate using only publicly available information,” Shimomoto comments.
As a result, the process of designing aircraft for Ace Combat 8 revolved around a cycle of gathering publicly available resources, designing prototypes based on them, and having manufacturers review them for inaccuracies.
“They would tell us, ‘This part is outdated,’ or ‘This part is incorrect.’ A lot of our interactions revolved around incorporating that feedback and gradually bringing the aircraft closer to the real thing. But what’s interesting is that some of the feedback manufacturers gave us was based on information that isn’t publicly available, so we’d end up wondering, ‘Are we actually allowed to know this? Is it really okay to implement this?’” Shimomoto says.
Even so, the devs say they continued to work in the details through close discussions with manufacturers, and even received input for in-game descriptions. “The people who build these aircraft are deeply passionate about them, so their commitment is reflected not only in the visual accuracy of the jets, but also in the accompanying texts.”
Apart from licensing, to ensure a high level of realism in Ace of Combat 8, the developers even traveled to military bases to record actual fighter jet sounds. Shimomoto recalls spending long hours under Okinawa’s summer heat aiming shotgun microphones at the sky while waiting for aircraft to fly overhead, jokingly calling it a “recording session straight out of hell.”
The developers also visited a museum built around a real aircraft carrier, collecting reference photographs and performing photogrammetry scans. Measurements taken on-site were used to help recreate the vessel at full scale. Since Ace Combat 8 is being developed entirely at a true 1:1 scale (unlike past entries that used exaggerated dimensions), aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and hangars all exist within a 100-kilometer-square world using real-world proportions. According to Kono, thanks to this, the first-person views within the game feel far closer to real-world footage than in previous titles.
Ace Combat 8: WINGS OF THEVE launches on October 2 for PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X❘S.
