Next Ace Combat

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Next Ace Combat
General Information
Developers	Project Aces ILCA
Publishers	Bandai Namco Entertainment

The next Ace Combat game (occasionally referred to, but not confirmed, as Ace Combat 8) is currently in production. It will be developed by Bandai Namco Aces, a joint venture between ILCA and Bandai Namco Entertainment's internal Project Aces team. The game will be a next-generation game running on Unreal Engine 5.

Development

The groundbreaking success of Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, released in January 2019, led Project Aces to begin planning for the next Ace Combat game by September of the same year. In an interview, brand director Kazutoki Kono and Skies Unknown producer Manabu Shimomoto discussed the need to advance the franchise "one step higher" and that "the needs of the players are becoming more diversified". Two years later, Shimomoto remarked that the project's start point "depends on who you ask"; he recalled the concept of the game being solidified around the time Skies Unknown sold 2 million copies as announced in July 2020, while Masato Kanno stated that he was thinking about the next game after the release of the Season Pass missions which concluded in November 2019. Kono remarked that he was thinking about the next game since the master copy of Skies Unknown was produced, remarking that it was the nature of being a brand director.

On August 18, 2021, during a trimmed-down livestream of a lengthy discussion between Ace Combat development staff, Kono confirmed that the next Ace Combat was in production. He also announced that ILCA, who had previously worked on Skies Unknown, would be jointly developing the game with them. Kono explained that appeasing "many fans of all tastes" was not a simple task for the small team at Project Aces, so ILCA will be more deeply involved to add more staff to the next game's development.