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 more likely it'll take off from water, for example. We want to make sure they coexist with aircrafts that exist in real life, and don't stand out too much in a bad way.

What does fighter jet research involve?

We go to different air force bases and observe the different jets, of course, and then we would interview pilots and have discussions about what it entails. We would ask questions about what a real-life dogfight is like, for example. In order to capture that sound, we would go bring mics to these jets and record the sound that the jet engines make. So we would basically go to military bases and then try to capture as much detail as we can, even down to the locker rooms. 

We asked one of the pilots to go through the [preparation for a] sortie by getting dressed, putting on the helmet, and then getting to the jet. We've observed them as they went through that process. 

Have you been able to ride in one?

I have wanted to get in one of these jets for the longest time, but they wouldn't let me.

Can you speak a little more on the little details? The base itself was really impressive.

Well, there's probably a couple of reasons for that, and one of them is there is a museum that features a lot of American aircraft carriers, and we use a technique called photogrammetry. We would basically capture and scan the 3D environments that are within that. And the models that we can scan from these, of course, are very, very low-resolution, so we can't use them as is.

But what it tells our environment artists and designers is that, "Oh, relatively this pipe is about this thick compared to the door or the room"--things that we couldn't extract just from looking at photographs. 

To our own surprise, in Ace Combat 7, we basically had to scale the world 10x, so things aren't exactly the same size. But with Ace Combat 8, we've unified and then made everything to scale down to the millimeter. So aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and even down to the hamburger and ketchup are all relative to scale in terms of their polygon. So because we aren't telling this 10x scale lie, so to speak, when we see the world through the lens and the cameras that we place, everything feels much more real.

A Shadow jet flying through the sky

You can definitely feel that in the cockpit. The city you fly over in the fourth mission feels like a real city.

We've integrated a lot of new tech in order to make the backgrounds and the environments feel that real. There's been a lot of tuning and adjustment to get that reality line just right. And our development team feels very strongly about this visual expression. Take, for example, there's a scene where one of the battleships goes onto land and then it knocks over skyscrapers. I don't know if you recall that from the trailer, but if you look really closely at some of the AC units on top of these skyscrapers, you'll notice the fan inside of the AC unit is spinning. And when I saw that, that's when I realized, "This team's crazy."

What's your go-to fighter jet when you're playing and the weapon loadout or the gun loadout?

I would say it's probably the F/A-18 or F-18F Super Hornet. And I know I can't say this out loud, but every time I sortie, I feel like I'm Tom Cruise.

I've been feeling like Tom Cruise all afternoon playing.

Well, that's probably the most fun way to enjoy this game, in all honesty. Just don't become Goose.