From Clouds To Ketchup Bottles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve Is Pushing The Series To New Heights

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve wants you to embody a hotshot fighter pilot in and out of the cockpit. For the first time in the series, the entire story is told from the first-person perspective, solely through the eyes of its protagonist. You’ll join your crew in the mess hall for meals, you’ll strap on your helmet before a sortie, and you’ll look your wingmen and wingwomen in the eyes.     GameSpot sat down with Ace Combat brand director Kazutoki Kono to discuss these changes and how the development team walks the line between fact and fiction for the long-running series. We chatted about clouds, fictional aircrafts, Tom Cruise, and highly detailed ketchup bottles. Joker squad soaring above the clouds GameSpot: The Clouds in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve are stunning. Can you talk a little bit about how they work? Kazutoki Kono: With regards to the clouds, we developed our own sort of layer inside of Unreal Engine called Cloudly, and it's a tool that allows us to create multi-layered clouds. This allows us to render different kinds of clouds. So if you're seeing rain and it's raining in the stage and there's rain in the clouds, that often means you're at a lower altitude because those are the only clouds that can hold rain. And if you go to very high altitudes, the clouds become thinner and more consistent in their texture. So the visual information isn't just there for the beauty factor, but it also contains certain information that can help inform the players of how high they are. So you don't always have to look at your altimeter. You can also sense it from the type of clouds you're flying through. The feeling of going through the clouds and seeing the cockpit get wet just never gets old. So if you get super technical and ask a fighter-jet pilot, technically it won't get wet, but that's going to be our little secret because I really love how that feels when you fly through clouds. I've been kind of playing with that feature since Ace Combat 7, and I think that's a sensation you can only get from this game as you burst through the clouds and keep flying into that dark blue sky. A pilot sits in the cockpit underneath a cloudy sky I really love Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick. So after seeing that, I was very excited to check this out. Has Top Gun: Maverick at all influenced how you tackle a game like this? Well, the first Top Gun came out when I was in high school, and fast-forward to a few years ago, we have Maverick. The Top Gun franchise is the textbook expression of what being an Ace Combat pilot is like. So you look at fighter jets, this vast sky, and the dogfights, that feels really, really cool, which I think embodies a similar spirit to what we're trying to achieve in the video game space.  And to speak to the effect Top Gun has, I think in the first trailer we revealed, we see our star pilot crash into the ocean, go underwater, and almost unanimously all the American fans say, "No, Goose!" I think there's something very ingrained in our movie-watching DNA that when you see a plane go underwater, you scream, "Goose!" The cutscenes all take place in the first-person perspective. What was the reasoning behind that decision? In the Ace Combat games in the past, the cutscenes would take place in a third-person POV, and you'd be watching someone else go through their journey. Ace Combat has three core pillars that make the game special, and one of them is that immersion of allowing the player to feel the experience of going from pilot to ace pilot and to hero. In Ace Combat 8, one of the ways we create that immersion is giving the player the sensation that they're on the same deck as the rest of their co-pilots and other team members. So we want players to feel like they have boots on the ground. It’s definitely easier to feel that connection with my copilots when I can look them in the eye in between missions, and zoom in on their faces. So I guess that means we've succeeded in what we set out to achieve. In my case, I always look and zoom in on the ketchup bottles. I was looking at a burger for a long time. But when someone begins talking, I try my best to make sure I'm looking them in the eye. Joker Squad mission briefing Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has real jets and some fictional ones. What design principles does the team follow when creating a new jet from scratch? First, we do a lot of research. We look at the technology available today and what technology seems to be on the horizon, and try to ground it. On the other hand, there's a cool factor to it. So there's definitely a, "Hey, wouldn't it be awesome if this sort of fighter jet existed?" and we go strictly from a design or visual perspective.  But in the end, with regards to a fictional craft, whether they're a giant jet or maybe something much smaller, it needs to be convincing. We think about how these would be used tactically in real-life situations. So if we're looking at a really, really big aircraft, it's probably mor

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve wants you to embody a hotshot fighter pilot in and out of the cockpit. For the first time in the series, the entire story is told from the first-person perspective, solely through the eyes of its protagonist. You’ll join your crew in the mess hall for meals, you’ll strap…

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve wants you to embody a hotshot fighter pilot in and out of the cockpit. For the first time in the series, the entire story is told from the first-person perspective, solely through the eyes of its protagonist. You’ll join your crew in the mess hall for meals, you’ll strap on your helmet before a sortie, and you’ll look your wingmen and wingwomen in the eyes.     GameSpot sat down with Ace Combat brand director Kazutoki Kono to discuss these changes…