Okay, so I know I never finished the article in my initial post, but today I ended up writing a draft of another article. (Admittedly, it's a bit less of an article and a bit more of a collection of thoughts.) This one doesn't have as much to do with warbirds, but as it is in the same vein of military aviation and video games and uses some of the points from a
Ace Combat and Real Life: Narrative Creation and InspirationsBy Noah Stegman Rechtin
14 October 2024
StorytellingAEWC AircraftThe narrator role is only possible because of the existence of AEWC aircraft in modern aerial combat. Their ability to monitor all aspects of the battlefield simultaneously naturally gives them the position of a semi-omniscient narrator. This role is reinforced by the fact that they are not visible during gameplay, giving the impression of being somewhat removed from the situation at hand. This again reflects real life military tactics. As high value assets with no self-defense capability, they are kept remote from actual combat.
Prior to their introduction, this would have been difficult to implement without breaking immersion. For example, an aerial combat game set during the Korean War or earlier could not benefit from their presence.
Radio CommunicationsAs aerial combat is often several thousand feet distant from both ground combat and other adversaries, radio communication is a key narrative device used to advance the story. However, unlike real life, players have access to both friendly and enemy communications. (In Ace Combat 7, this possibly is explained by a
throwaway line that the player's wingman has a handheld radio taped to the inside of their cockpit tuned to the enemy's frequency.) Some of it is simply background chatter of one non-player character talking to another to add to immersion, but other cases involve transmissions addressed directly to the player - almost always by enemy aces and especially in the case of a final showdown. This trope of communication between enemy fighter pilots goes back as far as the television show Baa Baa Black Sheep, where the main character, a heavily fictionalized portrayal of Pappy Boyington, has a
repartee with a Japanese pilot. However, the instances in Ace Combat differ in two key ways. First, the interactions, while frequently respectful of the player's flying skill, are very rarely, if at all, jokingly friendly. Instead, they are often a chance for the adversary to explain the motives for their actions. Second, the player character in Ace Combat does not speak, so it is up to the other party to carry the entire conversation.
Mythical PilotsAce Combat also takes inspiration from actual mythical pilots. These include
Corn Sherill or Colonel Tomb.
In Ace Combat 5, the player's flight is
shot down by a sympathetic pilot who, in an attempt to undermine a conspiracy, allows them to bail out seconds before shooting down the now pilotless aircraft to leave the impression they had been killed. As a result, when the players flight reappears on the battlefield, they are dubbed "ghosts".
The effect has actually come full circle, inspiring real-world legends. One of the earliest known, verifiable mentions of the Ghost of Kyiv was in a
post by a War Thunder player named ScottishKoala. This was almost certainly inspired by a YouTube video posted in April 2021 titled
The Ghost as both involved the same type of aircraft - a MiG-29. This video, in turn, was likely the result of the plot of Ace Combat 5.
Sukhoi FightersThe majority of the top enemy aces in Ace Combat fly advanced Sukhoi fighters from the Flanker family. The reason for the selection of these fighters as the top level aircraft was likely due to their prominence at the time the games were first released. During the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians sent their most advanced aircraft, the Su-37, to air shows such as Farnborough and Paris, where their impressive displays of supermanueverabilty wowed Western audiences. This was occurring around the same time that the first Ace Combat game (known as Air Combat) was released in 1995. So, it seems likely that the developers of Ace Combat were influenced by these displays and selected them as the most advanced, nonfictional aircraft in the game. (Ace Combat is well known for featuring imaginary "prototype" aircraft with unrealistic features that are technically the "best" aircraft in the game, but as these are largely not based on real life aircraft, they can be ignored.)
Implementing Real Life ConceptsReal life concepts have been implemented in ways that mirror their actual use. For example, semi-active radar guided missiles require the player to keep the target inside a circle projected on the heads-up display similar to how a real life aircraft must remain pointed at the target.
However, for game balancing reasons, there must be a reason for players to select them over fire and forget missiles. Therefore, semi-active missiles generally have a higher hit rate over AIM-120 analogs.
Novice difficulty involves the coupling of roll and yaw controls so that instead of rolling the airplane and pulling back on the stick to turn, an input of left or right on the stick on the video game controller results in both actions being combined. This is very similar in concept to how the control surfaces on the Ercoupe worked. Furthermore, in both cases the goal was the same: to enable inexperienced pilots to fly an aircraft.
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