More Ideas for Ace Combat 7

With E3 behind us, I've been thinking about what a new Ace Combat might benefit from. For your consideration, another set of suggestions and ideas of Ace Combat 7.

First, Proving Ground is my idea for a host of even more “arcade-style” gameplay. The idea is that Proving Ground would be a separate mode. Here, there are a number of events. For example, target practice – you get a time limit and you can use any plane you like to compete to clear a set number of targets the fastest using only your guns, or some variation therein based on a single weapon option (only missiles, only 4AAMs, etc). Or, air race – you have a preset course of rings/flags that you have to clear in order, and you compete for fastest time. Or, drag race – two players start on adjacent runways and have to race to take off and climb to a given altitude. The idea is that anything that goes into this mode is a short sort of mini-game type event – something you’d probably do in an old-school arcade game or finish in only a couple minutes. Some events here would be head-to-head, PvP-type events, while others would be leaderboard-type events, or maybe even a mix of the two.

The second idea I had involved tournaments in general. I think the standardized format they’ve adopted now makes a lot of sense. Instead of a bunch of tournaments that start and stop on different days, last different lengths of time, etc., have just two main tournaments a month, with special shorter tournaments intermingled every other week, and award tickets/medals that can then be redeemed at leisure from a broad library of available items. It is predictable, it is less maintenance-intensive than the previous tournament system, and as the library grows, it ensures that players can get what they want most at any given time, be it the new plane that was just added for the newest tournament, or that emblem that was added a couple months ago.

Next, Ban List. You don’t have to call it that, but that’s what it is. This idea might need more work than PA can put into the game themselves, as I’m not familiar enough with the online system to know if any limitations exist on the PSN side of things (I don’t play any other online games). But the idea is simple. You can populate a list of other players, similar to the way you populate your PlayStation friends list, that aren’t allowed to join your rooms, or aren’t selected for you when searching out rooms via Quick Match or Room Search.

The reasoning here is extremely simple – we all know there are players who either make things difficult by way of their usual actions (the MPBM spammers blinding everyone constantly in Raids, the Zombie room hosts), or who regularly boot players, or other such issues. And let’s face it, the last thing we want to do is keep a little black book of these folks to search through whenever you join a room or someone joins your room, or try to remember their names. Or even more, we don’t want to waste time with such folks entering a room and taking up a spot when neither side is really interested in having the other in a sortie and will just leave or get booted. If we could just have a list of such folks, then at the outset they’ll just be excluded from being allowed to enter the room in the first place. Baring the earlier mentioned technical issues, an acceptable limitation would be for this to only apply if you or the person on your list is hosting a room.

In line with that thinking, allow for more refined restrictions to rooms. So, not just the above or below 1500 CST for a plane, or ambiguous wide or narrow band relative to MR. I’m talking about something like a sliding scale for applicable plane CST, plane levels, weapon levels, player MR, setting what planes and/or weapons are allowed – near complete control over the makeup of a room. Additionally, as far as MR goes, there should also be a firm rule that ties room settings to MR unless a party is invited into a room.

For example, if you’re a 1900 MR player, you cannot set your room policy to “Beginners Only” because you are no longer a beginner if you’re all the way up to 1900 from 1500. You can’t set the policy to “Beginners Welcome” unless you have an aircraft set where your aircraft, its level, its parts, are all within a reasonable range of what can be expected for a real “beginner” that has joined the game. And, in line with the requested features above, you can’t set the lower limit for permissible MRs too far below your MR when setting up the room. I think I’ve stated somewhere in the past that setting the lower limit to about 150 makes sense (ex, your MR is 1900, the lowest MR that can join your room is 1750. There would be no lower limit, per se, because there would be a floor on MRs of 1500 (or whatever new scale they come up with).

This idea does need work, however, since I think some accounting must be taken for changes in MR during the course of multiple missions – does the limit/range float with your MR, or is it static for as long as you stay in the room? Does a player get automatically booted if after a mission their MR falls outside of your assigned range? Lastly, there should be an exception to these MR rules for invited players. In other words, no matter what your room settings are, if a player is invited, they can enter the room despite MR. All other rules still have to be followed, however, regarding limitations on aircraft sets, parts, etc.

Speaking of invites, invites should include a list of the room conditions. Rather than a blank invitation, why don’t they already tell you at least what the room policy is, how many players, what map the room is on? As it stands now, you get an invite, unless you directly talk to the person inviting you, you have no idea what map they’re on or anything. A quick heads-up in the invite itself would be extremely convenient.

Lastly, for now, add about 5 seconds to the aircraft set selection screen when a mission is getting underway. This is just a minor preference tweak. Sometimes a mission is ready to go and I have a different set I want to use than the ones I’ve been using already. Unfortunately, I have many sets of the same planes but with different part/weapon load outs. It’d be nice to have a few extra seconds to figure out which one I actually want to use for the mission without the mad dash through my 7 or 8 sets per three main roles.