Assault Horizon: Behind the scenes

How the story came to be

Keeping the series' core values was always top priority

 . . . but it did make things interesting

  

While it’s been set in a fictional universe, the Ace Combat series has always featured realistic renderings of aircraft. When I was asked to help develop what became Assault Horizon, I took that “core value” of the game as a starting point – the story had to be as realistic as the aircraft.

Of course, the story had to be very exciting as well. And the Aces team had a number of other things on their wish list, including staging the story on as many continents and in as many geographic locations as possible.

There was another subtle little requirement, though this one wasn’t actually articulated by anyone. We all knew we wanted to have as many cutting-edge aircraft in the mix as possible. That meant not only that Americans would have to play a key role in the story, but so, somehow, would Russians. Because between those two countries, you have most of the world’s front-line jets.

(I initially wanted Chinese aircraft as well, but we had to drop that idea for various reasons.)

Even before they asked me to help, the Team experimented with flight models involving helicopters and bombers. The models were extremely impressive. Incorporating them into the story became another early priority.

The process began with some very basic story ideas, each no more than a few paragraphs long. After the team discussed and chose one, I fleshed the story into a narrative outline, focusing on four different pilots. Two of the pilots were fighter pilots – the characters that became Colonel Bishop and Guts in the game. (I should explain that, in modern air force terminology, a fighter can also take a ground attack role. Very few fighters can “only” do one role – the A-10A, a superb attack plane – comes quickly to mind as a notable exception.) Another was a helicopter pilot – DR or “D-Ray” in the game – and the last was a bomber pilot – Jan Rehl. (Jan actually now starts the game coming back as a gunship pilot. Her evolution, and the AC-130 itself, is a separate story; that all came about during later discussions.)

We discussed the story outline during a long series of meetings over several days or a week in California. We discussed everything possible at these meetings, not just the story – how would the helicopter scenes work, should we only have fast jets, etc. It was always great meeting the Japanese team: they brought snacks from Japan with them, which I inevitably ended up monopolizing. I did offer to share my cigars with them, but I had no takers.

These sessions were extremely interesting. Writers, especially novelists, generally work pretty much alone when they do their thing; at most, they may interact with one or two editors. In this case, I was working with a large team full of ideas; getting everything focused was sometimes a challenge. The requirement that everything in the game be realistic was both a blessing and a curse – the story had to be something that could happen, which narrowed down the possibilities. We limited weapons and engagement sequences to those likely to be encountered in the real world. (In case you’re wondering, this also applies to Trinity, whose key ingredients and mechanics are real.) At the same time, I had to find a way to use all of the cool possibilities that the assets and engine they were developing were capable of.

The story grew, shrunk, then grew again. Once I was fairly confident of the narrative, I began translating it into an outline of cut scenes – the cinematic pieces where players can’t interact with the game – and missions. Once that was done, the team did some heavy editing for a number of reasons related to the technical requirements of the game. I edited their edit – also heavily – and we spent another week or so in California hashing things out.

There are always limitations on what you can do. For example, early on we wanted to have a V/STOL version of the F-35 - the F-35C – involved in the game. I wrote a really cool mission for it, which would have shown off all of the real airframe’s capabilities. But that proved just too ambitious – maybe in Ace Combat 8.

When I wrote the original outline, I realized there was more story than we could use, and this continued over into the mission outline. There was a whole section of the game set in Paris, for instance; unfortunately we just couldn’t get everything we wanted in.

After the outline was set, I started working on the cut scenes. One of my goals from the very beginning was to tell the story through gameplay as possible. This meant not only that the missions had to be tightly integrated into the story – the missions always flow from them – but that things that part of the story is told in the missions themselves. This made for more work as we finished the cut scenes and started to get down to the missions. Not only was the team very concerned about how the missions would flow, but the dialogue had to be honed very carefully. And of course, the missions had to be conducted in a very realistic manner. Working with them, I was part writer, part military consultant, part designer. There were a lot of changes and additions we had to make so that the missions would unfold the way they do in real life.

Games are not real life. Pilots in real life often say that a sortie or flight mission consists of six or eight (or more) hours of terrible boredom punctuated by ninety seconds (or less) of sheer terror. In writing the game, we had to reverse that equation – and then cut out the ninety seconds of boredom. So there are some compromises in telling the story. But it’s as close to real life as you can get in a game.

Besides the in-person meetings, we had many, many video conferences. We used email extensively, and even occasionally resorted to phone calls. Working with the team was an interesting and invigorating give and take. While I’ve collaborated with people before, I had never collaborated with anywhere near so many at one time.

And here’s something that gave me pause: At most sessions, there were three translators struggling to tell the team what I was saying, and vice versa. For someone who makes his living communicating, that in itself was a humbling experience.