I had never stumped a translator in an interview until I sat down to chat with the team behind Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. When the word “cumulonimbus” came up in a question, an interpreter from Bandai Namco had to, understandably, stop to pull up a Google search on his phone. Over his shoulder, I could see him showing Ace Combat brand director Kazutoki Kono a hand-drawn diagram of cloud formations to properly communicate my question.
That’s the kind of hyper-specific conversation you’re bound to get into when talking about Ace Combat. The long-running flight simulation series is so meticulous that every little detail is approached scientifically. Wings of Theve is set to continue that tradition come Oct. 2, and take it to new heights. If you want proof of that, just look to the clouds. No, really.
Ahead of Wings of Theve’s launch, Kono and producer Manabu Shimomoto gave me some flying lessons, walking me through the game’s first and fourth missions. There was a lot to rave about from that session: The jets fly with precision, the sound design is top-notch, and the story, about a country’s fake propaganda hero having to become an actual ace, is an unexpected riot. But it’s the team’s commitment to realism that caught my attention as I soared through puffy cloud formations, moisture streaking across my canopy.
You might not think much about what goes into making clouds in a video game, but it’s of the utmost importance for the Ace Combat team. A game like this could be brutally boring without them.
“This is a game that takes place in the sky,” Kono told Polygon. “When you think about it, the sky is an empty box. It’s this giant space that doesn’t have any level design, so to speak. So in order to create ‘maps’ within the sky, we need clouds. And clouds are actually very convenient for our purposes because they offer cover. You can use them for hide and seek, but they don’t have collision.”
Two things happened at the start of development that were instrumental to the team cracking cloud tech. The first was the creation of Bandai Namco Aces in 2022. The team was established as a “central command” for the Ace Combat franchise, with developers fully committed to the series. That was a big change, from Kono’s perspective. Previously, the team behind an Ace Combat game would scatter to work on other projects once work on the game was complete.
“That doesn’t leave a lot of the know-how in one place,” Kono said. “Aces is intended to be a repository of that, where all the experience can be retained, and there’s a much more long-term growth strategy for how we pass that information on to new team members.” (When I said that it sounded like Kono had put together his own team of wingmen, he cracked a joke using Wings of Theve’s crew command controls: “I press the D-Pad, but no one listens to what I have to say!”)
Establishing a dedicated team would help Bandai Namco focus on developing new tech for the series. And one of the fruits of that decision was Cloudly, a proprietary middleware engine that’s layered on top of the proper game engine. That’s the magical tech that allows the team to render realistic-looking clouds. That was a significant change from the series’ last installment, 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.
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